Category / New York Times

by Edward Champion

Who is David Carr to Set the Limits of Comedy?

Maud points to this New York Times item on Gawker. David Carr criticizes blogs (and specifically Gawker) for being “remarkably puerile to make jokes…[when Fairchild Publication] has posted guards in the company’s office because [Peter Braunstein] is suspected of drawing a target on people working there.” Gawker editor Jessica Coen may revel in bad taste (certainly Coen’s ridiculous identification of Laila as a “Muslim-by-way-of-Portland blogger” has been deservedly taken to task by several parties). But who is to suggest that Gawker, as tasteless as it might read at times, should be criticized solely because Carr finds it offensive? Is it possible, perhaps, that in finding gallows humor in the verboeten (even through Gawker’s decidedly tawdry timbre), Coen may very well be discovering another mode to express “the vocabulary for genuine human misfortune?” Or maybe she’s alerting six million readers that yes, Virginia, contrary to the safe ‘n’ sane overlords who hold the keys to the castle where none are offended, tea is served at noon and the happy little elves dance a harmless waltz, you can indeed find a guffaw in the forbidden.

I haven’t been all that much of a Gawker fan since the halcyon days of Spiers and Sicha. But it’s truly unsurprising that we have another telltale sign here from an outlet which, on a daily basis, fails to stand by its dubious credo “all the news that’s fit to print” because they fear offending subscribers. One indeed that has suffered credibility problems of its own and that would publicly denounce anyone daring to push beyond the threshold into issues unseen and unexamined. First off, there’s the possibility that the image-obsessed world of the Condé Nasties or the sordid and duplicitous subculture of gossip journalism may have had a hand in pushing this sociopathic personality over the edge. Further, why was such a man employed, even after he exhibited stalking tendencies? Surely, any company who regularly sends reporters into the field would not want to face a costly harassment lawsuit from one of its employees.

That’s interesting from a human behavior standpoint and, as far as I’m concerned, ripe for comedy. Or as Mel Brooks once put it, “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die.”

Coen’s tossed off posts may be unfunny, but only because they are poorly phrased or lack a specific association. This is not to suggest the topic of rape, as hideous and as awful as the subject matter is, is entirely devoid of comic value. Mostly unfunny, sure. But did we learn nothing from Lina Wurtmuller’s ingenious cinematic satires of the 1970s or, more recently, Catherine Breillat’s films or Pedro Almodovar’s Kika, which have employed rape sequences to make audaciously satirical statements about how women are regularly subjected and humiliated? The Lenny Bruces, the Richard Pryors, the Lina Wurtmullers, the Onions and the Terry Southerns of our world all understood that comedy designed for audiences who are easily offended by studs which mismatch a country squire’s cufflinks is never revolutionary and, for the most part, quite dull.

One of the reasons blogs have thrived is because they combat stiffs like Carr, columnists who exist on the Gray Lady’s payroll solely to bang out 1,000 words pointing out the bleeding obvious. Blogs dare to employ tones and write about taboo subjects that elude a profit-driven newspaper. They eschew the American newspaper’s prudish tone and have no full-page advertisers to answer to. In the best of cases, they combine wit, irreverence and an original idea. Perhaps the six million people are drawn to Gawker because they want to see what Coen will come up with next. Or perhaps they wish to take a trip down a dark road to discover the sordid alleys that mainstream outlets fear to tread.

Sure, it may be “more adult” to look the other way, avoiding some of the more deranged realities of our world, whether through disgust or willful ignorance. But such an approach also means siding with the newspaper-reading Babbitts of the world, those who would remain unchallenged and trapped within the obligations of crippling mortgages they must meet, children they must raise, and bosses they dare not cross. Humorless miens indeed.

by Edward Champion

Why Fear Michiko?

Hot on the heels of Michiko slamming Banville into the ground (with an unusual silence from certain quarters), Notes on Non-Camp points to this profile, which claims Michiko to be “the most feared book critic in the world.” More feared than Dale Peck? Or James Wood covering a “hysterical realism” novel? I think the real question here is whether Michiko Kaukutani, who has veered too frequently into distressing fictional affectations of late (is Michiko’s fury the mark of an aspiring novelist?), is a critic worth her salt anymore. Is it really valid criticism for a writer to cling to safe dichotomies (“style over story,” “linguistic pyrotechnics over felt emotion”) while spending most of a review summarizing a book rather than discussing its literary worth? If Michiko found Banville irritating, that’s fine. If she feels that she was alienated from Banville’s story, that’s fine. But it’s simply not enough to offer these sentiments without supportive examples, much less refusing to make an effort to discern the meaning within the text. That’s the least any reviewer can do when approaching a work of art. And given that the New York Times offers a book reviewing clime in which fiction has devolved from an enduring presence to some charming summer-stock production that you attend simply because a relative is in the show, it seems extremely strange to me that Michiko’s generalizations are continually accepted and indeed “feared” by authors and the publishing industry alike.

by Edward Champion

After Blog Life

1

Blog life changes fast.
Blog life changes more times than you can change your underwear.
You sit down to lunch and you know that there’s a blog awaiting you.
The question of pity parties.

Those were the first words I wrote after it happened. I had sent off yet another epistle to a media outlet. Mr. Tanenhaus’s assistant had personally telephoned me, telilng me that I was “chasing windmills” and that the New York Times office would no longer be accepting my brownie shipments. I can’t be sure about the dating on the Microsoft Word file (“Last-ditch olive branch letter to Sam Tanenhaus.doc,” I think it was called). I had long since deleted it and freed up that portion of my hard drive to download more porn. I sure as hell was’t Joan Didion, who clearly had more important things to say to the Gray Lady’s affluent and upper middle class demographic. I could sweat long and hard on a thoughtful essay about Gilbert Sorrentino or the interesting history of Soft Skull Press, but in the end if Didion wanted to write some 6,000 word essay on the sensation of putting two quarters into a soda machine, she’d have top priority and wouldn’t be edited at all. Never mind that I had suffered my own personal grief in 2005 and had used my sense of humor and perseverance to keep on writing.

For a long time I wrote haikus.

Blog life changes more times than you can change your underwear.

The ordinary underwear, not the expensive boxers I wear to give girlfriends smooth and easy access.

At some point, in the interest of remembering that letter, I decided not to allow myself to be crippled by morally complex decisions. Instead of laboring over a Word file, I wrote half a play, traded notes with a producer about a screenplay we were developing, banged out a lot of words on a novel-in-progress, began a literary podcast, and continued to blog profusely. All this with a full-time job. Like most writers, I didn’t have the luxury of a literary reputation to fall back on. I saw immediately that quibbling over the haikus was probably a bad idea, because, really, what good is there in laboring months over a sentence? I recognize now that there is nothing unusual in this, that most writers aren’t nearly high-profile enough to earn that particular advantage and that the Times was culpable in allowing a talented writer to take a colossal misstep, playing into the sympathies of a liberal elite that had very likely never known a day without a hot meal, much less stretched their hand across the class chasm to listen to and understand the very people they purported to support. Maybe back in 1966, when they were hungry and struggling and dealing with editors who would call them on their shit, these writers might be capable of stunning us with their amazing powers of observation; without exception, they had declined to do this for quite some time, never deigning to speak with the freaks and the bohemians and the dissidents and the crackheads and the troubled souls so regularly observed in my everyday life (but apparently not theirs) that the Sunday Times Magazine had so regularly ignored. Instead, they bankrolled top talent and suggested that they write about vacuity. They played into the whole essayist superstars mythos. And all this as the New York Times Company had laid off staff while silently pondering why the shares had dropped.

“And then — blogged.” In the midst of life we are surrounded by obsessions, and I had said this sentence one too many times. It had not been said by any philosopher of note. Later I realized that my rage at the newspapers, compounded by their deafness to my creative pitches, is what led me to become some febrile chronicler of literary motifs and happenings. Friends were kind enough to not tell me directly that I was chasing windmills, letting me find out for myself that such a regular plan was far from tenable. Never once did I exploit the intimate details of my personal life. All this without that bradykinetic yet pivotal period of thinking, of allowing dreams to unfold and wild ideas to transform into arguments and complex tales.

One thing’s for sure: there was never any hired help named Jose to pick up my mess. I cleaned my own toilet. I washed my own dishes. Every week, I picked up the detritus. And I never once asked my reading public to feel sorry for me through such a shameless publicity stunt: a desperate attempt to draw in more readers by headlining one individual’s personal misery.

2

August 23, 2005, a Tuesday.

I had ordered a large pizza.

I had seen the pizza advertised in a leaflet that had somehow been crammed into my mailbox and decided to give it a shot.

The pizza, with its pepperoni and mushrooms, would give me the strength to blog some more.

The pizza man arrived, I tipped him generously, I offered two slices to a friend and one to a homeless lady in my neighborhood.

All this, of course, is unimportant. But one must understand the exact contents in which the Tanenhaus letter was sent.

If the pizza could be said to have any feelings, I’m guessing it would have felt relieved yet somewhat homicidal as the pizza slicer partitioned it into eight pieces. If it could read, the pizza would probably be reading Sun Tze’s The Art of War, which is particularly sad, as the pizza itself was unarmed and had no appendages, much less a sentient mind, with which to attack its assailants.

The pizza was scarfed down by dawn.

Another one was ordered less than two weeks later. It was a pretty good idea, considering the untold burden of grief.

* * *

I used to have a large white dry erase board in my small rented room, for reasons having to do with a silly effort at appearing professional. Initially, I drew task lists for what I needed to do during any given week. But because the markers were colorful, I soon began drawing obscene pictures involving stick figures in flagrante delicto. I would invite friends to come by to play drunken games of Pictionary, carefully rationing the large bottle of Jim Beam that I had purchased on sale at a Safeway earlier in the year. I was using the dry erase board as a way to keep things going in light of the grief that threatened to destroy my routine.

I sobbed as I scrawled those naughty pictures of stick figures. At the time, I wasn’t getting any and I had resorted to relentless masturbation to maintain my sangfroid. So should we all.

There was still no hired man named Jose who would help me balance my checkbook. I couldn’t afford such a man. Like most people, I had to sort this all out by myself.

But the dry erase board helped, even if it proved the wrong conduit for me to organize my life.

3

I had to believe that the grief could die. I had to believe that learning to laugh at the crazy world around us, without resorting to a long-winded personal essay, was the right road out.

I did lots of laughing in the months that followed. I’ve always done a lot of laughing. I’ve been kicked out of funeral homes for laughing. The fault, I suppose, is mine.

Yet.

I didn’t own a car and I slept on a futon. What kind of conditions were these for a man in his early thirties? Would things eventually happen for me because I had a pretty strong work ethic and produced who knows how many thousands of words? If there were any deficiencies in the way that I was approaching this, it was perhaps the simple fact that the things that interested me were quirky and alternative and not always highbrow. I had actually enjoyed The 40 Year Old Virgin! What was wrong with me?

Dale Carnegie, in How to Win Friends and Influence People, points out that the essential characteristic of winning people over is to dun your nose as you listen to a person of influence. Certainly, people interested me and I fancied myself a halfass listener. But why should anyone have to suffer fools gladly when one exists in either an imagined or a palpable sense of grief? Why should anyone reveal so many pedantic details to move newspapers? Shouldn’t some things be kept close to one’s chest? Shouldn’t more substantial things be written about?

The smell of sweet bullshit.

That was one way I could come to terms with this ethical conundrum.

I did not anticipate a midlife crisis at the age of 31.

by Edward Champion

Bill Keller: Chickenhead of the Month

It’s been a while since we awarded anyone the Chickenhead of the Month. We like to reserve this special prize for a person making truly astounding leaps in logic.

Lo and behold! While we may be on hiatus from the Brownie Watch, we opened the NYTBR‘s pages yesterday and found a fantastic dollop of silliness from none other than Bill Keller himself!

In a letter, New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller responds to the Posner media essay that appeared a few weeks ago in the NYTBR. Keller has made a fantastic claim: namely, that the New York Times is in the business of providing something “more elevated and consequential.” If this is the case, how does this explain the continued ridiculousness of the Style Section? Or last week’s amazing devotion of Times resources to Bridget Jones? Or yesterday’s slipshod cover story in the Magazine, where an alternative source was served up by a bogus claim of “technological advances” and, as Mr. Birnbaum noted in the comments section, a wholesale refusal to reference Hubbert’s Peak?

If this is what Keller calls “more elevated and consequential,” then I shudder to think about what he considers conventional. What business does Keller have talking about a professional code when he has hordes of Times staffers devoting precious time and resources to distinguishing between a salwar kameez and a sari? How dare Keller pull this stunt within his own pages when, by his own admission a few months ago, his paper failed to cut the mustard in covering Iraq? When I think about professional code, I think of a a newspaper that dares to question anybody and anything — whether the Bush Administration or Hilary Clinton. It is not, as Keller suggests in his interpretation of Posner’s article, a matter of being either “liberal” or “supine,” but of being regularly active and constantly probing any and all subjects, where others would fall asleep at the wheel. That is, in a nutshell, journalism. And believe it or not, it is not nearly as partisan in the blogosphere as Keller would suggest.

Additionally, one wonders if Keller’s letter is a desperate ploy to give the NYTBR the illusion of intellectual debate. Despite a few brownie shipments sent to Mr. Tanenhaus and some successes, it has been clear to us that the Keller-Tanenhaus experiment has, for the most part, failed. Today’s NYTBR is more concerned with providing column inches to John Irving and Nora Roberts, giving odious reviewers like Leon Wieseltier and Joe Queenan more paychecks than they deserve, rather than reflecting culture and literature, much less providing an “elevated ” place to talk about it.

We suspect that the onus falls more on Keller than on Tanenhaus. We therefore grant Mr. Keller our “Chickenhead of the Month” award.