Feminarcissism

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:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/12/books/review/amanda-knox-by-the-book.html?ref=books

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.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanda_Knox

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Meredith_Kercher

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

[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.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ruth-marcus-the-duke-porn-star-students-degrading-plan-to-pay-tuition/2014/03/11/b70c96a4-a940-11e3-b61e-8051b8b52d06_story.html

[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:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

[Neubemerkung  23 III 14]  Gar nachdenkenerregend, diese Geraetswerbung. Heutmorgens im NYTBuecherblatt gab’s ‘ne faustdicke Amazone die mannekinweise das Kindle hochhielt.

Snowquester: the tragic aftermath

Millions of you followed our family’s travail, in excruciating detail (Doc, wifey, junior, sis, and our beloved dog, Spot), here:

STORM OF THE CENTURY BEARING DOWN ON THE MID-ATLANTIC SEABOARD

Thank you for your cards and letters.  Those of you who sent soup cans -- thanks, fine, no more soup now, we have enough soup.   Those of you who sent cash -- You’ve got the right idea!  Keep sending it, in small, non-consecutive, unmarked bills.  (Swiss francs only, please;  no dollars or pesos.)

But still there will be some of you, agonizing,  What more can we do ??!??!?

And the answer is:

BUY MY F*CKING BOOKS!!!

Entartung im Zauberberg

In Thomas Mann’s great novel, we see a microcosm of decaying European culture  on the eve of the Great War, depicted in an elite mountain-top sanatorium.   There a particular self-generating and self-coddling culture  grows as though in a petri dish.

And now the virus has descended zum Flachland:

Quand l'université diplôme les malades

Après Paris, l'université d'Aix-Marseille va créer une formation diplômante en santé pour les patients qui s'impliquent autour de leur maladie.

Les patients sont devenus des acteurs de santé à part entière. Fort de ce constat, le président de l'Université d'Aix-Marseille, le Pr Yvon Berland, a annoncé le 14 décembre, lors du 4ème colloque Médias & santé, la création à la rentrée 2013 d'une «Université des patients» ouverte exclusivement aux malades chroniques.

http://sante.lefigaro.fr/actualite/2012/12/28/19643-quand-luniversite-diplome-malades

Such are the honors of our post-Arrowsmith age,  where we celebrate as heroes (or more usually, heroines) not the physician, but the valetudinarian.  (The article is accompanied by a photograph of invalids in mortarboards.)

An American counterpart of such sensiblerie would be the cult of Henrietta Lacks, crossed with the para-academic “credit for life experience” movement.

The broader phenomenon is nicely analyzed by Pamela Haag, here:

http://theamericanscholar.org/death-by-treacle/

*

Pour d’autres friandises

de la confiserie 

du docteur Justice,

consultez:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

*

~

Superficially, the antics in Marseille and Paris might seem heart-warming, or, at worst, just the sort of goofy things people do, like dressing up dogs in little outfits, or electing a kitty-cat “King for a Day”.  (“For a day-y …?!%!#!”)  But like blood in the urine (an apt metonomy for this sort of glurge) it is pathognomonic of a deeper malaise.

To cull stray citations almost at random from current reading:

From a noted historian:

These days, my discipline and our culture  like to deny the historic importance of individuals.  … Ours is an age of denigration. … The denial of greatness traduces experience  and diminishes our collective lives.

-- Fritz Stern, Einstein’s German World (1999), p. 250-1

A caveat against a lax misreading:

 “Individuals” are indeed central to contemporary PC-thinking;  but these are essentially individuals ohne Eigenschaften, save such as they inherit automatically by virtue of their membership in some identity-group.   And crucially, these individuals are without historical importance since, across a broad socio-political spectrum, the trend of the Zeitgeist is the denial of history.

Likewise  someone might stick at “an age of denigration”.  There is also exaltation -- but of a self-undermining kind.  When the likes of Lady Di or Lindsay Lohan can become celebrities, it makes a mockery of any genuine achievement.

Within my lifetime, there arose in America, the practice of applying the word genius  not to rocket-scientists (or mad scientists -- our colonial relation to the essentially European notion of genius  has ever been rocky), but to, um, baseball-players, footballers, like that.   Those, that is, of a certain cast.  This -- along with the gleeful self-flagellating pouncing upon the entity bordering the Kaap die Goeie Hoop -- was part of the reparational self-abasement of the cowed and right-thinking, a peace offering toward those who, truth to tell, mostly just wanted jobs.  It seemed a quintessentially late-American moment.  Yet, what was my surprise, upon encountering this passage, in chapter 13 of the first book of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (1930), referring to Austria in the years immediately following the Great War:

Es hatte damals schon die Zeit begonnen, wo man von Genies des Fußballrasens  oder des Boxrings  zu sprechen  anhub.

Nothing new under the sun!

*

Für psychologisch tiefgreifende Krimis,

in pikanter amerikanischer Mundart,

und christlich gesinnt,

klicken Sie bitte hier:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

*

Related posts:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/10/dont-blame-neuroscientists-for-this-one.html

 

Numerology Porn

Tonight saw the debut of a new series on Fox, called “Touch”.    For this viewer, three features seemed promising:

(1)  It is in the tradition of the Paranoid Thriller, where there is a deeper significance to everything, where tout se tient -- ou se tiendrait, if only we could decipher what was going on.

(2)  It stars Jack Bauer.

(3)  It centers on Numbers.

Now, this last is in line with our theme of Our Friends the Integers, so we nursed a fragile hope, despite the precedent of the flat and mindless use of supposedly numinous numbers on “Lost” (along with the downspiral of that initially eye-pleasing series  into rank incoherence).   And despite the disappointment of last year’s Rubicon,  which shares some motifs, and showed a glimmer of promise;  but all eyes were dry when the series was canceled.

So, “Touch”… How is it?  (Or rather:  Was it;  for I shall not be watching again.)

First, I am pleased to report, the show once again exemplifies the sort of linguistic fidelity that would have been unimaginable on television during the years when I was growing up -- for them, no more than a fake/comedic ‘German’ accent, and an occasional ‘French’ ooh-la-la.  The scenes set in Iraq (which were the best, or least-worst, to my taste) were staged, not merely in Arabic, but in authentic Iraqi dialect.

For the rest, you may sift the rubble  without turning up any trinket of interest.

For one thing, there were incredibly many vastly annoying ads.  Does not Fox know that, for the Season Premiere,  you’re supposed to first sucker-in an audience, get them hooked, and only later melt their minds to the consistency of Twinkie-filling?

But the main thing:  There’s just nothing there.  Anyone can toss up a bunch of unlikely co-incidences and go Ooooooh.   As a rule, implausible coincidences count as a weakness of a plot.   To turn these into a strength  requires a very skilled hand indeed.  Thomas Pynchon did a decent job of it in The Crying of Lot 49 (though I enjoyed that book much more as an adolescent, than I did when I re-read it as an adult).   The shallow minds that put this mess together  show no such skill.

~

It is furthermore possible -- though I shall not be tracking this to see -- that the series may develop in the direction of Disability Porn.  There is a lengthy tradition of exploitative uplift, giving false hope to the suffering (whose cognitive faculties, understandably, are trumped by their emotions), e.g. “Lorenzo’s Oil.”  (I would link to Wikipedia, yet, remarkably, neither the English nor French nor German versions make any follow-up reference as to whether the stuff actually works.  Judge for yourself:

            adrenoleukodystrophy

The direction the series might take  is actually even more catagogic, suggesting that your autistic child may actually have nothing wrong with him at all, he is just “differently  abled”, in fact a geeenius, who can foil terrorist attacks  halfway around the globe  with a blink of his eyelids.

We Interrupt This Blogcast …

We selflessly interrupt our annual fund drive to direct your attention to this pressing need.

Little Timmy Needs Your Help!

There he lies, on his little bed, almost totally consumed by his tragic affliction.

He moan;  he groan;  he chat with fellow-sufferers on the telephone.

Already you are probably racing to begin collecting those little aluminum pull-tab thingies – but alas!  In a tragic development, it turns out that little aluminum pull-tabs are (incredibly) *not* a cure for cancer, or almost anything else!  In fact, the only disorder this favorite remedy is actually able to address, is hematopultabopoenia – a condition so rare as to be non-existent (and which in any case responds equally well to aspirin).

No-o, the only thing that can help Timmy now  is –

 =>  Send your Social Security Number, credit card info, mother’s maiden name (if applicable), penis length (again, if applicable) and bank account numbers,

to Timmy’s personal private website:

     www.let’s_all_chip_in_and_buy_Dr_J_a_yacht.com(edy)

In conclusion, here is a message from Timmy Himself,

sent personally to you and you only :

              “TH – th -     th-th-th-   ..   thththththth—

                  th-th-th-a-    -a ---    thththththaaann-k-   th     th

                            th th th ththaannnkkksssss …..”

TWoDrJ Annual Fund Drive

 It’s pledge week here chez Doctor J, and we are ready to field your calls.

Many of you may be unaware that this site receives no subvention of any kind: neither public nor private, open nor clandestine.  The whole thing is powered by a single hamster in an exercise wheel.   

The hamster has not eaten for weeks.   You need to send money so we can buy him some life-giving carrots.  (Please don’t send carrots;  I’ll handle that end.)  If you do not:  The hamster will die.    The hamster will expire in furry agony, the wheel will grind to a halt;  and this fine site will go off the air -- forever.

And it will be   all --  your -- fault ….

Everyone who contributes will be enrolled on the Honor Roll, to be prominently posted for all to see.   Categories (by rank):

Supporter:

     Give us all your possessions, plus your first-born.

Minor supporter:

     Liquid assets only, and the runt of the litter.

Cheapskate:

     $10,000.

Flint-fisted penny-pinching tightwad:

     $1000.

Lowest form of pond scum:

     $100.

[The remaining categories cannot be named on a family-oriented blog.]

So -- send in your hard-earned dollars, for the good of the cause.

If the drive is successful, we might have another one next month.