But A Full-Scale Nervous Breakdown, Complete with Men in White Suits, Would Really Make Laura Miller Do the Happy Dance!

Laura Miller: “One of the most interesting and newsworthy response I ever got was when I asked a novelist who’d just written (but not yet published) a memoir, ‘People often find that when they write about their past, the process dredges up old memories they’d entirely forgotten. Was there anything like that with this book that really surprised you?’ He told me he’d remembered being molested by one of his parents’ friends as a child!”

Laura Miller Watch

Inarguably, Laura Miller is the most ridiculous book reviewer be found in print today. More pompous than Harold Bloom, more mystifying than even Harriet Klausner, more passive-aggressive than Dale Peck, and more general than even Janet Maslin. As an ongoing service to our readers, we institute the Laura Miller Watch, in a better effort to understand how this humorless “critic” works.

SOURCE: On Beauty by Zadie Smith (Salon, October 1, 2005)

SENTENCE: “Academic cultural critics — who get a few taps on the snout in Zadie Smith’s new novel — often say that works of art can only be fully understood in their historical context.”

ANALYSIS: Besides being a criminally dull lede, this sentence points out the obvious. Besides, academic cultural critics do indeed play lacrosse and attend costume parties from time to time. The question here is whether Miller gets out much.

SENTENCE: “It’s the kind of book that reminds you of why you read novels to begin with.”

ANALYSIS: Miller can’t even be bothered with a batty metaphor, such as “It’s the kind of book that reminds you that literature does retain the power to soil one’s pants” or “It’s the kind of pleasure that will have you eschewing sex, ice cream and go-go boots until you get to the end; hence, setting a dangerous precedent in the spare time department.” Has Miller learned nothing from cinematic one-sheets?

SENTENCE: “Howard is more or less the novel’s central character, so it’s an extraordinary and significant aspect of “On Beauty” that Smith has given him ideas she doesn’t endorse.”

ANALYSIS: More or less? Some shadow of a doubt? And Miller’s strange notion that authors “rarely endorse” ideas they oppose suggests a highly literal-minded person. Sometimes, a cigar is more than a cigar.

SENTENCE: “Although this is a comic novel and, at least in part, satirical, it’s unlike any other satire I’ve read in that it’s completely free of contempt.”

ANALYSIS: John P. Marquand? Jonathan Ames? Any satirist with a Jonathan permutation for that matter?

SENTENCE: “The ideological battles between Howard and Monty (who in the course of the novel comes to work at Howard’s university) may sound, in this polemical age, like the meat of the matter, but they’re only a foil.”

ANALYSIS: These ideological battles. They’re people, yes? It’s only a foil. And if Miller wants to resort to cliches, she may as well use “heart” instead of “meat.” One of the disadvantages of being your own editor is that you’re allowed to make such jejune mistakes. (Any blogger knows this.)

SENTENCE: “All of the above are greater or lesser examples in a catalog of human folly, but none are depicted without compassion and a certain measure of delight in their vibrant particularity and underlying universality.”

ANALYSIS: Cluttered clauses. Incoherence. More nouns to keep track of than names at a cocktail party. Who’s the copy editor over there? Is there a copy editor over there?

Hiatus (Sorta)

We’ve been working our keisters off here. Two Segundo shows in the works (one we hope to get up tonight with a very special guest), with a third one on the way. So literary news and the like are going to be slow for the time being. Bear with us.

In the meantime, please enjoy:

AM Roundup

Yesterday’s Definition of Libel is Today’s “Duel of Stories”

Laura Miller: “The ”Opening Skinner’s Box’ controversy looks like a quarrel about facts, but it’s really a duel of stories. Slater’s subjects are saying, in part, ‘How dare you presume to tell the story of us? Now we’re going to tell the story of you!”’

For more on the subject, check out Ron’s Lauren Slater archives, which include comments from Slater herself.

Not That the Blogosphere is Biased or Anything

This is perhaps the best review I’ve ever read in the New York Times. So What Do You Do, Laura Miller? That I’d like to see.

A Special Column by Laura Miller

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Miguel Cohen is unwell this week. He reports that he Super-Sized his McDonalds meal by mistake. He believes he's suffering from mad cow disease. I asked Miguel what increasing the size of his fries and drink had to do with beef. He replied, "You just don't know, man." While the doctors investigate Miguel's condition, Laura Miller has agreed to fill Miguel's shoes with a special exclusive.]

Columnist’s block, like a bad heroin habit, is a subject of lackluster interest to those who are capable of filing a column that actually includes a few nifty ideas and a great annoyance to me personally. It differs somewhat from writer’s block in that the columnist is faced with the prospect of sounding important, because the columnist must keep her job, even when she really doesn’t know the audience she’s writing for. “To hell with filing the article,” once said Jayson Blair to a friend, “let’s go get sushi and not pay. I’ll make the shit up as it comes along.” Well, we all know what happened to him. At least the writer has talent, whereas the lofty book columnist is often a windbag who cannot grasp so much as a whit of the typical book enthusiast’s mind. The columnist does not understand that most people do not give a damn when she writes in a smug, highfalutin tone and that, if they do, they’re generally reading the New York Times Book Review with their pants draped around their ankles while on the john and have every intention of using the back page as a clever substitute for something I cannot mention in a family newspaper. Either that or they’re a unique form of starfucker, pining for a Salon gig, or they’re wise enough to keep their trap shut. If you complain of not being able to write a column, you might be openly mocked in the book community (though never to the columnist’s face) or even satirized on a blog.

Marilyn T. Chambers, star of Behind the Green Door, wouldn’t dare to write a book column unless she had some inkling of what she was talking about. Nevertheless, you can see how important I sound because I referenced a figure whom you may or may not have heard of. The brilliance of including Chambers in this paragraph is that I can spell out her credentials (i.e., Chambers starred in a piece of smut called Behind the Green Door, in case you didn’t catch that fact the first time) and somehow get through Chip McGrath’s filter. Chambers is intrigued by the neurological dimensions of faking orgasms in general, not because she has endured columnist’s block (although, if she were a columnist, we might say that she has) but because she has gone through episodes of something not dissimilar: she sings for her supper. We might call this avocational condition “whoring.”

Just how much whoring is too much remains a tricky question. Mata Hari, who was a sharp cookie who liked to dance, and who found herself gyrating obsessively (giving the columnist redundant clauses with which to increase word count), explains, “The dance is a poem of which every movement is a word.” Scientists studying the effects of logorrhea, which is what might happen if you were to apply a certain rectal condition to words (i.e., this column), tested for it by asking columnists for columns describing their state of health. Most responded with columns that were too long: the shortest at around 6,000 words. Some scientists resigned from the project immediately. A few collapsed, reporting that they could not read a newspaper column for several years, after being exposed to such limitless verbosity. The handful of scientists left standing asked, “What the hell does any of this have to do with Mata Hari and dancing?” In fact, an early draft of this column was so bad that the folks at the copy desk pined for another David Brooks column. If you’re a prolific popular columnist (or you think you are) like me, you can delude yourself into thinking that you’re better than those groundlings making wisecracks, or those people who have a sense of humor that you lack. Writing a worthless column is an art, albeit a low one, beyond reproach, that comes out painfully. You may not realize this, but my life is in shambles. Of course, if I admitted anything human like that, then perhaps the perceptions would shift. If I suggested in any real way that I was passionate about books, then you might love me the same way you love Michiko. But allow me this small metaphor, for I am not inured to rejection notices the way that most of you may be. I have not written a novel and I don’t have Michiko’s Pulitzer, but I am a columnist. And I have an airtight gig. I want to keep my job. You like me, right?

A little snark or playful banter is easy to mistake for something serious. I’m not quite sure where I was going with the Mata Hari reference. And I don’t know what I was thinking when I mentioned Marilyn Chambers. But perhaps I can offer a scientific hypothesis that will get us back to the main.

In 2003, many of the book blogs, reading the New York Times Book Review because they liked books and they liked Chip, noticed from time to time that one columnist was full of shit. In other words, too much of a grand gig (i.e., writing for the New York Times), as well as too little (i.e., anything written for Salon), can trigger columnist’s block, and this explains why “the bigger the lack of passion, the bigger the block.” Lewis H. Lapham writes the same damn column every Harper’s, but at least he is a harmless enough crank. Lapham may be one-note. He may have a testosterone that doesn’t quit, but he has a passion and a sense of humor. So it was something of a shock to see him writing about George Plimpton this month. Apparently, someone at Harper’s finally got around to telling him that his blustery assaults on Bush were maiming small children in Ecuador.

A friend of mine (yes, I have friends) once invented a “cure” for this condition: to counteract a series of humorless columns, create something more humorless. Think up a bland, banal subject — something like columnist’s block or covering a book that you’re inclined to hate from the first page — and expend 1,000 words on it. In your mind invest it with such life-defining importance that your entire journalistic career hinges upon this one central silly thing. You must take a topic that no reasonable person would waste a paragraph on and approach it as if it were some truly important ideal, something as important as the Federalist Papers, something as pivotal to this planet as carbon.

Blocked or not, columnists have been disappointingly unimaginative in their responses to columnist’s block. One exception is the tiny literary genre of book columns on the back page of the New York Times Book Review. No, not those cutesy cartoons. Hint hint. I know of only one worthwhile columnist who I can read even when I know she is suffering from columnist’s block. In fact, you may not know this, but I have assembled a small chapbook which features this columnist’s ouevre. It reflects, I believe, the highest pinnacle of columnist’s block. Such useless credos as “you have to live” before you write are pure poppycock, because any real columnist knows that she can bluff her way through anything. Particularly when the columnist has failed to live and cannot crack so much as a smile. Whatever tortures the reader must bear, that makes it art in my book.

Fact Checking Laura Miller’s Ass

It’s bad enough that Laura Miller can’t refrain from mentioning films or television in her New York Times book pieces, but she’s also ill-informed on the history of Peter Pan film adaptations. The “first live-action film” of Peter Pan actually came out in 1924. In fact, Kino issued it out on DVD not too long ago.

Born of a Bitter Bland Seed

So who is Laura Miller anyway?

Here’s an audio interview of Miller extolling the wonders of the Intenet back in 1999. But, beyond her nasal droll, I must warn you that, if you click on the stream, you’ll probably be frightened by Miller’s pronounciation of the word “niche” or the moment when she kvetches about carrying all those complimentary books around. A harsh life, to be sure. Despite all this, she’s still bitter.

This profile reveals that Miller was born in 1960 and, before getting into writing, started off as a publicist for a co-op that ran “a San Francisco sex toy store and mail order company.” (Apparently, it was Good Vibrations.) One of her first big breaks came with an essay called “Women and Children First” which appeared in a collection called Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information, whereby she proffered the following Third Wave generalizations: “In the meantime, the media prefer to cast women as the victims, probably because many women actively participate in the call for greater regulation of online interactions, just as Abbie Irving urges Wade Hatton to bring the rule of law to Dodge City. These requests have a long cultural tradition, based on the idea that women, like children, constitute a peculiarly vulnerable class of people who require special protection from the elements of society men are expected to confront alone.”

Her last column for The New York Times Book Review section was more about the documentary The Weather Underground than books, but didn’t have nearly as many generalizations as previous inside back page columns. But I’m mystified. Just why is Miller still writing for the Times? And can we hope that Charles McGrath’s replacement will see the light?

To look at this from a pugilistic standpoint, if you threw Michiko Kakutani and Laura Miller into a gladiator pit, I’d favor Michiko by twelve points. At least she has a sense of humor. Plus, the Pulitzer helps.

[3/22/04 UPDATE: Months later, I've largely ignored Laura Miller. And looking back at this entry, I see that I've demonized her a bit. That isn't really fair. I should clarify that, since I've already spilled my thoughts (some would say foolishly), the transformation of Laura Miller is one of the saddest things that ever happened to books coverage. But I have every hope that the Miller I read five years ago will return.]