Year / 2004

by DrMabuse

Tanenhaus Watch — August 22, 2004

This week, it’s very hit-or-miss at the NYTBR. However, Tanenhaus should be commended for taking a few risks (he scores by throwing in de Beauvoir and Persepolis 2, but Klosterman is a serious mistake). Suzy Hansen’s article on plagiarism is a nice journalistic piece, but it belongs in the magazine. All in all, we’re disappointed that we couldn’t put on our oven mitts, because we were definitely in a brownie-baking mood. We’ll let the statistics stand alone.

Total Full-Length Reviews: 5
Full-Length Fiction Reviews: 3 (While the fiction-to-nonfiction ratio still seems right, five reviews is still on the slim side. Sam thus lost out on the brownie point here this week.)
Full-Length Nonfiction Reviews: 2
tanenhauswatch2.jpgAppearance by Choire Sicha? Yes, and Sam has him wisely taking on “tough girl fiction.” (One and a half special brownie points awarded.)
Number of Non-U.S. Authors Covered: 2
Kickass Retrospective? Yes! On Simone de Beauvoir. (Special brownie point awarded.)
Articles Written by Women: 6 (We’d like to think we had some infuence here, but we’d be kidding ourselves. Nevertheless, one and a half special brownie points awarded for the dramatic shift here.)
Number of Articles Covering Comics: 1, a nice review of Persepolis 2, respectful and inviting (special brownie point awarded)
Laura Miller’s Presence? Yes (minus one brownie point). And it’s pretty bad this week. (Minus an additional brownie point for a preposterously phrased opening sentence and because she completely fails to understand the joys of Norton Juster and Jules Feiffer’s The Phantom Tollbooth, which was a hell of a lot more than a frickin’ “road trip.”)
tbba2.jpgThe WTF? Assignment: Chuck Klosterman, who we thought would bring a humorous take on self-help books in his Real College review, but instead decides to pull a Wieseltier and dispense his own advice. (minus one brownie point)

TOTAL NUMBER OF BROWNIE POINTS FOR AUGUST 22, 2004: 2
Does Sam Tanenhaus Get a Brownie This Week? No (minimum 3 brownie points needed to score brownie)

by TheRake

Zorro he was not

Recently, I wondered aloud about the seemingly substantial number of Great Writers who suffered brothel-related misadventures/trauma in pubescence. Someone appropriately named “tlon” simply replied “Borges,” and sure enough, here it is in this month’s Harper’s (and elsewhere, no doubt) in a review of Edwin Williamson’s Borges: A Life:

Williamson has Borges caught between the noble sword of his heroic grandfather and the gaucho knife. His mother enforced the one; his father, the other. Borges went off to his first day of school with a knife his father gave him for fighting duels on the playground.

[…]

When Borges was a shy adolescent, his father made an appointment for him at a Swiss whorehouse. He couldn’t bring himself to go. The trauma of this reluctance, Williamson explains, remained with him throughout life: he had let down his father’s chivalric ideal of a man wielding sword and penis with equal fervor, a man with balls enough to engage in a bloody knife fight at every opportunity. On the other hand, he had lived up to his mother’s ideal of moral purity.

Somewhere, surely, a Freudian is smiling.

by DrMabuse

Gone for Weeks

Show being prepped. Not enough sleep. Barely enough time to change socks and comb hair. Read my lips: no new content (until first week of Sept.). Interested parties (i.e., all 2 of you) may venture forth to the Wrestling blog (soon to be added) if you care, where inside dirt (of an amicable sort) will be dished. Superfriends?

[UPDATE: And yes, we know we can’t spell. Thank you for noticing. Forgive us. We’ll fix it soon. We’re looking more and more like Keith Richards. And the hell of it is, aside from caffeine, there have been no drugs involved.]