Category / New York Times

by Edward Champion

Oral About Okrent

In my career as a litblogger, I was never persuaded that an ombudsman was a good idea. This isn’t because I have any particular beef against ombudsmen. It is simply because litbloggers can’t afford to hire them.

But my own history with ombudsmen aside, it is safe to say that there is clearly no man more deserving of a blowjob than Daniel Okrent. Not only would I invite Okrent to fornicate with any member of my family (including those under eighteen), but, if nobody was available to wrap lips around his cock, then I would willingly step in and do the job myself.

Because this is the kind of industry Okrent inspires. Okrent isn’t just any ombudsman. He’s the ombudsman for the New York Times. Which means that, in all book review circumstances, he must be given the reverential bukkake treatment. No constructive criticism. No hint of a flaw in his chiseled sentences. No in-review notation of an ethical conundrum. Like the obverse but no less sleazier conundrum of John Dean reviewing Mark Felt’s memoir, with Okrent, it’s all the ooze that’s fit to squint. Never mind that there’s a stupendous conflict of interest or that Okrent’s gushing flow might just blind.

The point is that Okrent is there, waiting for you or any reviewer, either literally or metaphorically, to unzip his fly and work some magic. Unfortunately, in this case, it looks like Harold Evans and Sam Tanenhaus got to Okrent’s phallus before I did. So my mouth remains dry and unsullied. But I suppose there’s always the Wall Street Journal‘s ombudsman to consider. Assuming, of course, that the Journal will print my in-house rodomontade as easily as the Times ran Evans’.

by Edward Champion

Visual Tumult and Banner Heckling Doesn’t Count

New York Times Corrections: “An article on Sunday about commencement speeches around the country referred imprecisely to audience reaction to a speech by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at Boston College. While some people turned their backs on her and a protest banner was unfurled during her appearance, the scene inside Alumni Stadium where she spoke did not turn tumultous, nor was she heckled while speaking.”

by Edward Champion

Gray Lady Interview Policy: No Depth Perception?

Chip McGrath talks with John Updike. While the results are certainly better than, say, a sycophantic and humorless conversation with Sam Tanenhaus, one reads this Updike interview wondering whether McGrath was operating on auto pilot. After all, how many times does one get to talk with Updike at length? Okay, so he’s no fan of the Internet, but shouldn’t you give the man some space to ramble at length?

Not only is an observation concerning Updike avoiding cell phones in his novels not followed up on, but there’s also Updike’s self-effacing remark about how he’s “not clever enough” to write a murder mystery that stops short of a full confession. Is this current NYT interview policy? Talking with one of the most distinguished American novelists without latching onto the potential depth he’s feeding you?

Maybe McGrath had a golf game or something that day, but I have to conclude that this was a half-missed opportunity.

by Edward Champion

NYT Obits Staff: Asleep at the Wheel?

If Sam Tanenhaus’s inflated self-importance weren’t ridiculous enough, consider how ineffectual the Gray Lady has been these days at noting the passing of vital literary authors. For a newspaper that has a stockpile of prewritten obits outnumbering the Associated Press and that apparently has the resources to videotape seminal geezers just before they kick the bucket, one wonders how much work is actually going on at Times headquarters. Is the obit staff malingering, perhaps passing the hours playing Minesweeper? Or is there so much fact-checking of fact-checking of fact-checking going on that the NYT obit staffers are precluded from performing their jobs?

As readers here may recall, the New York Times took a week and a half to note Octavia Butler’s passing, weighing in four days after all of the other media outlets had filed their articles. And, as pointed out by Dan Green, nearly one week after Sorrentino’s death, they have completely failed to note it, save through an inconsequential blurb. In fact, the Los Angeles Times, which has perhaps half the resources and twice the uncertanity that the Gray Lady does, has done a far more promising job, obtaining quotes from Don DeLillo and Christopher Sorrentino and giving its readers a very thorough overview of who Sorrentino was, even for those unfamiliar with his work.

But the New York Times, which Tanenhaus recently declared at BookExpo the nation’s best newspaper for literary coverage, can’t even be bothered to register more than a peep for a man considered by many academics and literary enthusiasts as one of the greatest experimental novelists of the twentieth century. (Ironically, Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew was named by the Times as one of the best books of 1979. While this was mentioned in the Gray Lady blurb, one would think such past accolades would justify substantial coverage.) As such, how can any serious intellectual or cultural enthusiast take the Times seriously as a arbiter or a gatekeeper, much less a newspaper capable of delivering current news to the public in a timely fashion?

Perhaps the answer might reside within John C. Ball and Jill Jonnes’ book Fame at Last, which took apart 10,000 obituaries published by the Gray Lady and found, much like Tanenhaus’s stag party approach to assigning reviewers, that the majority of the obits were (guess what!) allocated to men — specifically, Caucasian men of affluence.

One might argue with the exclusion and/or deferral of Butler and Sorrentino that this elitism carries over to writers. If you have darker skin, if you don’t write male menopause novels, and if you dare to try something groundbreaking, then your chances of being recognized are slim to none.

So let’s assume that the Times gets its act together and starts taking the time to fact-check and recognize cultural luminaries outside of its rigid boundaries of Important Figures. Can a newspaper which reports news long after every other outlet remain a viable newspaper in an era with nearly unlimited conduits for immediate reporting? That might have worked before the Internet, but last I heard, it was the 21st century and the people wanted their news online. Which presumably insinuates a certain immediacy.

Perhaps Chris Anderson’s suggestion that the era of the blockbuster is over applies to the Times‘ failed timeliness. The Times would rather waste its column inches on silly infograph-laden articles about people working out at the gym (do such articles really attract newspaper readers?) rather than report “the news that’s fit to print.” I’ll play the devil’s advocate and suggest that perhaps it was the “fit” portion of that slogan that the Style editor had in mind when he assigned Guy Trebay that article. Even so, a newspaper that has its staffers publicly declaring it today’s cultural apotheosis should have internal coordination between sections (here, Books and Obits), regularly demonstrate a variegated sweep of what’s happening in the cultural world and maintain an internal organization structure which ensures the timely turnout of news. Anything less is a corpulent corpse ready to collapse under the weight of its own bier.

by Edward Champion

Not As Elastic As the Bullshit Crammed Into That Lede

New York Times: “Dress codes these days are as elastic as a bungee cord, expanding to accommodate all manner of once unthinkable workplace infractions: midriff-baring T-shirts, visible bra straps, slips that double as skirts and jeans paraded everywhere, save for those last redoubts of propriety, the courtroom and the church supper.”

Lede Rewritten: “Dress codes are becoming more flexible.”

by Edward Champion

Didn’t You Know, Deborah, That Your Type is a Dime a Dozen?

Finally, someone ripostes:

What field do you think is a good one for young women now?

The field of celebrity journalism.

Oh, no. I hope that is not an expanding field.

Yes, it is. That’s why I suggested it. We’re all competing to find writers and editors who can do it. The circulation of the Star is 1.5 million every week, and then it’s 9.5 million readers, because it has a lot of pass-along readers

by Edward Champion

Gray Lady Turns Yellow?

I’m not sure if I buy the logic in this New York Times article about paperback originals:

Ms. von Mehren, the publisher, said that following the article in the Book Review, Mr. Mitchell’s novel sold “10 to 20 times better than he ever had here. It really reignited his career.” Next month, Random House will publish Mr. Mitchell’s next novel, “Black Swan Green.” In hardcover.

Au contraire, Ms. von Mehren. A quick look at certain dates will deflate this mistaken hypothesis. A moment, if you will, as we dig up the history:

August 29, 2004: Tom Bissell, a perfectly fine critic, reviews Cloud Atlas for the NYTBR.

August 17, 2004: Random House releases paperback original of Cloud Atlas to bookstores.

Now I’m no marketing expert. But it seems to me that 12 days is enough time for the most feverish literary folks to read Cloud Atlas in whole and then tell their friends and loved ones, “Holy shit! You have to check out this David Mitchell guy. This is the best damn literary fiction I’ve read in years,” which then inspires these folks to do the same.

But more importantly, there is the history, which indicates (in about five minutes of Googling):

Early 2004: Some guy named Edward Champion manages to get his hands on the UK hardcover and says “David Mitchell” in nearly every sentence he writes and speaks. Others soon follow.

August 17, 2004: Village Voice reviews book.

August 22, 2004: David Mitchell interviewed by Washington Post, as well as Cloud Atlas reviewed. He is also reviewed by St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

August 27, 2004: Cloud Atlas anounced as part of Booker longlist for 2005. Cloud Atlas is reviewed by Boston Phoenix.

October 2004: David Mitchell appears in many U.S. bookstores. He is interviewed by a guy who doesn’t know what he’s doing.

October 10, 2004: Cloud Atlas reviewed by San Francisco Chronicle.

In other words, not only did Cloud Atlas get a hell of a lot of publicity from multiple outlets, but there were many reviews other than the NYTBR reviewing it. I also think Random House was smart in getting Mitchell into the States in October to revive interest in it — in the event that some folks hadn’t heard of it already or the attention had flagged.

So for the Times to take exclusive credit (as much as I’ve mentioned Mitchell over the years, I certainly wouldn’t) for Cloud Atlas‘ success is not only laughable in the extreme, but highly irresponsible. Could it be that this is an in-house effort on the part of the Times to prop up their decaying Sunday literary offering? What can we expect next from the Gray Lady? A Sam Tanenhaus centerfold in next week’s New York Times Magazine? Propaganda isn’t working for the Bush Administration and it certainly won’t work for the NYTBR.

by Edward Champion

I Won’t Phone It In For You Folks

The day is shot, the schedule too impacted for a roundup or a post pulled from my matts. I’ll see you tomorrow. But in the meantime, as Ron and others have pointed out, the Gray Lady has reported some major book news: Sales of Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman are up after the book appeared on Lost.

I don’t have the Times‘ resources, but I just might be able to scoop the New York Times by reporting that J.T. Leroy is a fake, James Frey is a liar, and, to my great astonishment, Vollmann was nominated for the National Book Award (will he win?).

Besides, the biggest piece of news doesn’t involve books, but it depresses the hell out of me: Bush got re-elected! Who knew?

by Edward Champion

Ethical Nightmares from Tanenhaus’s Dream Factory

Sam Tanenhaus apparently has no problem violating the New York Times’ Ethical Journalism Guidebook. So opines Ariana Huffington, who notes that assigning Kathryn Harrison, who had been slammed in two previous Dowd columns, to review Maureen Dowd’s Are Men Necessary? is a violation of the Times‘ credo to avoid “the slightest whiff of favoritism” (Rule 134 in the EJG). Huffington suggests that hiring Harrison swings the favoritism in the opposite direction.

To play the devil’s advocate here, if we momentarily consider the Times to hold any stock outside of the laughing variety, Huffington may not be going far enough. Rule 141 in the EJG states:

Staff members who have a publisher or a movie contract, for example, must be exceedingly sensitive to any appearance of bias in covering other publishers or studios. Those with any doubts about a proposed arrangement should consult the standards editor or the deputy editorial page editor.

Granted, both Tanenhaus and Harrison can get out of this through a loophole. Tanenhaus himself does not have a publisher or a movie contract. But assigning Harrison to review Dowd was a clear case of fanning the flames of bias. This paragraph from Harrison’s review, for example, has very little to do with the book:

LIKE most people who work hard at seeming to be naturally funny, Maureen Dowd comes across as someone who very much wants to be liked, even though she has problematically joined forces with those women who are “sabotaging their chances in the bedroom” by having high-powered careers. “A friend of mine called nearly in tears the day she won a Pulitzer,” Dowd reports in a passage about men threatened by successful women. ” ‘Now,’ she moaned, ‘I’ll never get a date!’ ” Reading this, I can’t help wondering if Dowd is that self-same “friend.” After all, it’s rare that she resists naming her friends, most of whom have names worth dropping: “my witty friend Frank Bruni, the New York Times restaurant critic”; “my friend Leon Wieseltier”; “the current Cosmo editor, my friend Kate White”; “my late friend Art Cooper, the editor of GQ for 20 years”; “my pal Craig Bierko”; et al.

If the intention here is to settle a personal score or to ape a Dale Peck-style attack mode, why is this review even being published in the Times? If Dowd’s book is, in Harrison’s view, quite awful, then surely the text itself would provide enough examples. And surely there were any number of outlets who would have pushed Harrison further over the edge and provided a more legitimate medium for this competitive ruckus.

Without providing a source, Huffington claims that Dowd complained to Tanenhaus about the review-author matchup. Tanenhaus apparently suggested that if Dowd couldn’t handle criticism, then she shouldn’t write books.

Perhaps Tanenhaus’s intention in hiring Harrison was to demonstrate to NYTBR naysayers that the Times does indeed review books impartially while still abiding by the Gray Lady’s ethical mythos. Well, if this were the case, why hire someone quite prepared to sabotage Dowd, thus spawning a grand mess of journalistic ethics?

Unless of course the NYTBR is no longer about ethics, much less thoughtful reviewing. In which case, why indeed should fiction publishers hold credence in a weekly media outlet that prefers to blow its column inches on redundant sentences like “No mere page turner, this is a page devourer, generating the kind of suspense that is usually the province of the playwright or novelist.”

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.

by Edward Champion

It’s the Statement, Stupid

This morning’s New York Times features some disingenuous reporting about the oil crisis from Peter Maass:

One of the industry’s most prominent consultants, Daniel Yergin, author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book about petroleum, dismisses the doomsday visions. ”This is not the first time that the world has ‘run out of oil,”’ he wrote in a recent Washington Post opinion essay. ”It’s more like the fifth. Cycles of shortage and surplus characterize the entire history of the oil industry.” Yergin says that a number of oil projects that are under construction will increase the supply by 20 percent in five years and that technological advances will increase the amount of oil that can be recovered from existing reservoirs. (Typically, with today’s technology, only about 40 percent of a reservoir’s oil can be pumped to the surface.)

As Paul Roberts argued in The End of Oil and James Howard Kunstler railed against with jaded fury in The Long Emergency, what technological advances? Where will these come from? What are they? Do we pull these out of the hat and get a crummy raffle prize?

I particularly like the way that Maass not only allows Yergin to get away with this criminally general statement (thus underplaying the oil crisis), but prefaces the statement with “one of the industry’s most prominent consultants” and “author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book,” failing to point out that Yergin never singled out any tech specifics in his article.

So what was the point of this ridiculousness? To provide “fair and balanced” journalism? To throw in a credentialed naysayer without actually calling up Yergin and ask him to elaborate on his views? That’s lazy journalism — the kind of misleading context that I expect from some priapic warblogger.

by Edward Champion

NYT = People-Style Profiles Can’t Be Too Far Away

LA Weekly reports on a development that may kill two mediums with one stone. Apparently, movie studios plan to kill their full-page advertising for the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. (At $100,000 per full-page ad, that adds up to a lot of dough.) The justification? The studios want to attract younger, lowbrow moviegoers and they view these two newspapers as “older and elitist.”

This is a fascinating development for several reasons: (1) This only confirms the notion that Hollywood is uninterested in making adult films (or at least appealing to adult audiences). (2) Studios have previously thrown so much money at publicity that their lavish spreads have seemed almost inconsequential. Is this a sign that they’re starting to tighten their belts? (3) That entities as slow-moving as movie studios recognize the declining readership of newspapers suggests that, at least on the entertainment front, we’re about to see a real transformation in entertainment journalism and related media. I sincerely hope that online outlets aren’t co-opted, along the lines of the corrupt Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

Of course, since this isn’t yet a fait accompli, expect to see Bill Keller promote more entertainment-oriented junk on the front page in a last-minute effort to woo back Hollywood.

by Edward Champion

Sarah Boxer Must Be Replaced

Sarah Boxer: “But when it comes to the content of Web comics, Mr. Groth was right. The comics that use digital technology to break out of their frozen boxes are really more like animated cartoons. And those that don’t are just like the old, pre-digital ones, without the allure of the printed page and with a few added headaches for reader and creator alike.”

One can make the same case for Sarah Boxer’s columns. A healthy dose of skepticism is one thing. But Ms. Boxer’s columns are, for the most part, large dollops of bitter reactionary bullshit. She’s about as flexible to culture as hardened doss sticks. I’ve yet to see Ms. Boxer crack so much as a smile or let down her guard in any way. I suppose this is because, in the Boxer universe, all forms of DIY or independent culture are essentially bullshit. The people who try something different are no less than crazed dilletantes. Ideally, these upstarts should be mowed down by machine guns, lest they tango with the status quo or, even worse, disrupt Ms. Boxer from the west wing in her seculded estate. Damn these artists! They’ve deigned to force Ms. Boxer to actually think and write a column!

On the whole, Ms. Boxer’s snotty and inert columns are almost completely devoid of joy. One wonders why such a jaded glacier is on the Gray Lady’s payroll. After all, without going all Julavits here or condoning some phony 100% happy approach, if one is writing about culture, shouldn’t one actually enjoy the subject one is writing about?

Let’s take a look at a few choice examples from Ms. Boxer’s oeuvre.

July 11, 2005: “She is so bored by her job that she will even let you take control of one of the security cameras where she works. If this sounds intriguing, you might want to stop reading here and just go visit the site.”

Instead of trying to understand the approach, perhaps contextualizing the art with the heightened number of surveillance security cameras around us, what we have here is instant dismissal without thought.

June 28, 2005: “I don’t know about you, but I don’t have that kind of time. Which raises the question: what kind of art do you have time for?”

Never mind understanding the concept behind John Simon’s “Every Icon.” It’s either instant or it sucks!

May 12, 2005: “Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of these. It just means that you’re not cool. And now that you’ve learned about them in the mainstream media (known as MSM on the Web), they’re not all that cool, either.”

Why is this paragraph even necessary? And why should hipness even matter in describing messages that disseminate across the Web?

* * *

What is the purpose of all this negativity? For the Times reader to pick up the Wednesday newspaper and feel superior to the disheveled upstarts? For a stockbroker to read the Times on the way to his miserable and artless job and say to himself, “Boy, I’m glad I chose the right path. Unlike these foolish urchins, I’m rolling in the dough. The never of these nincompoops!”

It seems to me that if a critic is writing about culture for a major newspaper, the effort expended should not be made mocking it, but analyzing it, using primary and secondary quotes, to put the cultural effort into perspective. While Ms. Boxer is certainly offering a “Critic’s Notebook,” one would hope that lead articles from the Arts & Cultural Desk would be composed of something more substantial and less half-baked.

by Edward Champion

Who is Brian Leiter (And Who Really Cares) and Why Did He Invite Himself to Write a Bitter Blog Post?

Brian Leiter quibbles over the New York Times‘ decision to run a lengthy review by William T. Vollmann on the new Curtis Cate biography of Frederich Nietzsche. Mr. Leiter, who apparently is a professor of philosophy, suggests that Vollmann has no expertise in the subject and displays none in his review.

I think Leiter is confusing the act of reviewing a biography (which does, after all, concern itself with a subject and his personal details first) with the act of summing up a man’s philosophy. Aside from Leiter subscribing to the traditional “credentialed” nonsense that often comes from bitter academics (perhaps because, while Leiter remains institutionalized and apparently quite miserable — in Texas, no less — Vollmann is busy turning out endless volumes of books, including a seven-volume treatise on violence), he concerns himself with Vollmann’s alleged failure to discuss Nietzsche’s philosophical ideas.

Leiter suggests that Vollmann “bizarrely ascribes” a “realism” to Nietzsche and suggests that Nietzsche does not hold the view that “cruelty is innate,” complaining that Vollmann fails to cite a specific passage. I’m fairly certain that Vollmann was suggesting one of Nietzsche’s most infamous statements from Thus Spake Zarathrusta, something that a certain Austrian perhaps took too much to heart: “Man is the cruelest animal. Whatever is most evil in his best power and the hardest stone for the highest creator.” Far from a “People magazine speculation,” Vollmann is willing to give the NYTBR readership the benefit of the doubt, presuming that they are familiar with Nietzsche’s basics. Further, Vollmann framed the “realism” within quotes, leaving little question to the reader that this was a speculation on Nietzsche’s capacity to tell the truth about the human race. This commonality, of course, what separates Vollmann’s work from many of his contemporaries on both the fiction and the nonfiction fronts.

Leiter suggests that Aristotle’s influence was “notable for his almost total absence from the corpus” and then deflates his argument by pointing to a few examples. I would argue that to dwell into the exact nature and percentage of Aristotle’s influence upon Nietzsche is to not only quibble over pedantics (something that more properly serves the purpose of academic journals, with their reams of paper quibbling over singular passages), but to ignore the realities of editing and publishing a major newspaper that is designed, after all, for mass consumption.

Leiter then offers a cheap shot, suggesting that Vollmann’s stroke has impaired his abilities to think. He then continues on this Aristotle tangent. However, I will agree with Leiter about his nitpicking concerning “individual Jews,” even though his own observation is largely a red herring.

Mr. Leiter’s post is more blustery than helpful and is about as uninviting as it gets. Personally I’m just a guy who knows a little more than the basics about Frederich N. and I’m sure Leiter certainly knows much more than I do about philosophy. But if Leiter seriously believes that the New York Times Book Review is intended to be serious and intellectual, then he clearly hasn’t followed its decline since the Bill Keller pledge to go more commercial from early 2004 and is similarly “uncredentialed” to weigh in. I also sincerely doubt nepotism factored into Sam Tanenhaus’s decision to hire Vollmann. Vollmann has always existed on an uncompromising edge, daring to write about issues that most novelists and journalists keep their heads in the sand about, and has faced a certain stigma enforced by folks too flustered to hear the truth.

While I agree to some extent with Leiter’s cri de coeur for intellectualism, his arrows here are misplaced. A biography is not a philosophical text, nor necessarily a response to philosophy. It tells us about a man and his details, yes. But it is not necessarily concerned with philosphy — although, it is helpful to the scholar wanting to find additional (if tertiary) context.

by Edward Champion

The Interwining Legacy of Things That Inexplicably Scare the Bejesus Out of You and Fiction

Written just after the author stepped into rush hour traffic and before he dared to look out of his own window before returning to his computer, Ian McEwan’s novel “Saturday” creates a hero who dares to live out a privileged lifestyle and worriedly thinks about his investment portfolio. It is fear, directed towards the expected and the humdrum and the implausible, that drives Mr. McEwan’s masterpiece. Today this fiction may seem as prophetic as Elizabeth Kostova’s “The Historian,” which features a palpable portrait of vampires tapping into victims while on the run. But both authors agree that today’s fiction is designed to present things that will scare the bejesus out of you, with ordinarily stable minds rushing to FOX News and conspiracy-themed newsletters in search of further things to be frightened about.

“We can never have enough things to be frightened about. I myself am terrified of half-cooked foie gras,” Mr. McEwan wrote in an Op-Ed piece just after enjoying a six-course meal on the very day of the London subway and bus bombings. (His article appeared simultaneously in Gourmet and Ladies’ Home Journal.) That same day Ms. Kostova wrote on her Web site, “The bombings sadden me. But, on the bright side, sales should boost up as people look for more things to be afraid of.”

soccer mom'With such inevitability and the persistent strain of soccer moms fearing that the terrorists could firebomb the small-town high school fields they regularly frequent at any second, some of the most ambitious novelists are not only addressing this climate of fear but going a bit hogwild in their depictions, leaving a legacy that is not only quite silly but good for drawing half-baked generalizations that can be referenced while engaged in pretentious cocktail party banter. This is what Mr. McEwan calls “the complacent stage,” a needlessly introspective and self-absorbed novel just after a big success (in this case, the remarkable “Atonement”). It would appear that this complacence is shared by Michael Cunningham’s “Specimen Days,” which is also considered a critical disappointment. Cunningham’s most recent novel offers Walt Whitman’s poems as the cure-all elixir. Have a drinking problem? Read “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed.” Feeling depressed (perhaps suicidal?) because your local Whole Foods Market decided to close early and you couldn’t get cheese made with coagulating enzymes? “O Captain! My Captain!” is right around the corner.

The important thing these days is for novels to reflect an almost pathological neurosis that only the richest 10% of our society can understand. This will then, in turn, perpetuate irrationally conceived fears in literature which detract from more pressing dilemmas.

by Edward Champion

Brownie Watch on Hiatus

As others have pointed out, the NYTBR is once again an embarassment. It’s the same old song. Richard Posner’s essay is not so much a book review but an excuse to whine about the blogosphere. The writers remain, for the most part, male, offering dull and uninteresting coverage for dull and uninteresting books. The insufferable Joe Queennan continues to earn a paycheck.

We’re so disheartened by the NYTBR now that we must temporarily take leave of the Tanenhaus Brownie Watch if we are to remain emotionally and mentally stable. Too many of our Sunday newspapers have soaked up our tears. It is only the crossword now that gives us comfort. We cry for Tanenhaus’ choice. The adjective “Faustian” comes to mind. We sob over the dismal state of current book coverage. But most of all, since we have enjoyed delivering brownies to him (yes, they have actually been delivered) on the rare occasions that Tanenhaus has cut the mustard (with, of course, not a single thank you note or email from the man), we firmly believe that Sam Tanenhaus cannot and defiantly will not produce a weekly book review section worth reading. Thus, Tanenhaus himself has ensured that no brownies can be delivered and the onus comes back to us in the end.

So we’ve put our little experiment on hiatus. The point has been demonstrated time and time again. We’ve kenneled the little doggy away. And oh does he whimper!

But one day, when Mr. Tanenhaus least expects it and we have talked out this book review contretemps over with our therapist, the brownies will, once again, be rightfully denied.

by DrMabuse

Round Robin

  • In light of the assaults on eminent domain and flag burning (and with the frightening prospect of Justice Rehnquist resigning looming in the air), there’s at least some good news on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting/PBS budget cuts. Yesterday, the House of Representatives voted by a 284-140 vote to rescind the $100 million cutback. And that’s really what current politics is about these days: finding scant hope in small victories while the fiber and sanctity of this nation is gutted. So bust out the party poppers while the apocalypse ravages across the heartland.
  • The so-called “Pope” has published a book that urges all non-believing Europeans to live as though God exists. If that fails, then there’s always putting on a tin hat and looking for crop circles in the hinterland.
  • It looks like Limbaugh and Noonan are running away from the Klein book. Their latest amusing claim is that The Truth About Hilary was “written and published by a bunch of left-wingers.” Well, that’s pretty interesting, given that Sentinel, the publisher of the book, describes itself on its webpage as “a dedicated conservative imprint within Penguin Group (USA) Inc. It has a mandate to publish a wide variety of right-of-center books on subjects like politics, history, public policy, culture, religion and international relations.”
  • Cynthia Ozick talks with the Melbourne Age.
  • The Connection continues its series of writers talking about other writers who have influenced them. The latest audio installment is Russell Banks talking about Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.
  • Evil Dead star Bruce Campbell is on a book tour for his new novel, Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way.
  • So can James Frey follow up the intensity of A Million Little Pieces with his new memoir? Mike Thomas of the Chicago Sun-Times talks with Frey and learns that Frey’s life is “sort of surreally magnificent.”
  • James McManus has been tapped to write a poker column for the New York Times. Executive editor Bill Keller says that McManus’ column will be “a literate combination of the drama, strategy, psychology and color of card play that should interest both serious players and the simply curious.” This from a guy whose idea of literacy is questionable at best.
by DrMabuse

Tanenhaus Watch: March 27, 2005

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WEEKLY QUESTION: Will this week’s NYTBR reflect today’s literary and publishing climate? Or will editor Sam Tanenhaus demonstrate yet again that the NYTBR is irrelevant to today’s needs? If the former, a tasty brownie will be sent to Mr. Tanenhaus’ office. If the latter, the brownie will be denied.

THE COLUMN-INCH TEST:

Fiction Reviews: 1 – 1 1/2 page review, 1 one-page review, 1 one-page roundup (Fiction in Translation), 1 half-page crime roundup, 1 half-page review. (Total books: 13. Total space: 4.5 pages.)

Non-Fiction Reviews: 1 2 page review, 1 – 1 1/2 page review, 3 one-page reviews, one half-page review. (Total books: 6. Total space: 6.5 pages.)

This week’s fiction coverage, most of it asphyixiated in roundups, is such a joke that not even Tanenhaus could be compelled to list the crime roundup novels in the table of contents. In fact, I’m surprised that Sarah hasn’t weighed in on this. It’s bad enough that Marilyn Stasio devotes a mere paragraph to the reissue of Joe Gores’ A Time of Predators, only to dwell upon how the Edgar Award-winning novel “shows its age” while declaring it a “good choice.” But Rupert Holmes’ innovative mystery novel-plus-CD, Swing, is pretty much dismissed through a comparison to one of “those interactive mystery game-books that were popular back in the mid-1980s.” Consider, by contrast, an honest assessment of Holmes’ caper, along the lines of what John Orr did last week in the San Jose Mercury News.

You have to love the disingenuouness of the roundup format, where you can offer general platitudes for the blurb whores (“thought-provoking fiction” and “strirring, impassioned glimpses of lost souls amid the rubble of history,” says Anderson Tepper), while avoiding any penetrating insight because you don’t have the space.

Conversely, if the fiction-to-nonfiction ratio isn’t bad enough (a mere 41% this week), adding insult to injury is Clive James’ self-serving takedown of Paglia and poetry (of which more anon) and the deliberate padding within Pete Hamill’s review of Boss Tweed. Hamill not only spends an execrable amount of space summarizing Tweed’s life, but he wastes half a paragraph informing readers about Thomas Nast. Wouldn’t someone interested in Boss Tweed, let alone any NYTBR reader, already know about Nast? Hamill also takes his opening Gore vs. Tweed gimmick a paragraph too far, beating a horse that didn’t deserve to die. (What next, Petey? Telling us you’d rather play sqaush or cross-stitch a quilt with the man? Ha ha! You amuse me. Sushi on me!)

Beyond proving once again how out-of-step he is with today’s fiction (even the Rocky Mountain News covered A Changed Mind two weeks ago), it’s clear that Tanenhaus has abdicated any effort to find the happy medium: the format allowing the reviewer to focus his energies within a taut word count, while preventing unfortunate asides. The 800-900 word review has served several newspapers quite well for so many years. Tanenhaus again demonstrates a truly unfortunate allocation of column-inches.

Brownie Point: DENIED!

THE HARD-ON TEST:

This test concerns the ratio of male to female writers writing for the NYTBR.

A total of four women have contributed to eleven reviews. As usual, three of these are fiction chicks, while the only female-penned nonfiction review goes to (go figure) Fat Girl.

This is infinitely worse than last week, particularly when one considers that the big reviews were handed off to those with Y chromosomes.

While it’s true that Rachel Donadio has penned an essay on Harvard, the essay spends most of its time chronicling Larry Summers’ exploits than the two books it cites (and is thus excluded from the fiction-to-nonfiction ratio).

Brownie Point: DENIED!

THE QUIRKY PAIR-UP TEST:

Pete Hamill, Clive James, Rachel Donadio, Liesl Schillinger, Barry Gewen. Yawn yawn and yawn. We haven’t seen such a predictable crop of names since the Fortune 500. What’s the matter, Sam? Is March Madness keeping you from approaching the interesting people?

Brownie Point: DENIED!

CONTENT CONCERNS:

The Sgt. Pepper-style numbered image collage of poets matches Clive James’ essay to a tee. It is as suitably insipid as James’ arrogance in print, little more than a paint-by-numbers palette for bored children who believe in image first and the love of language last.

James bemoans “the airless space of literary theory and cultural studies.” He claims that John Ashbery is “the combined status of totem pole and wind tunnel.” Most alarmingly, he declares that his “own prescription for making poetry popular would be to ban it — with possession treated as a serious misdemanor, and dealing as a felony.”

That such passive ignorance and anti-intellectualism would be promulgated in a book review section of a major newspaper is truly disheartening.

With such obvious enmity against the liberal arts expressed in the first five paragraphs, one wonders why any level-headed editor assign a book about poetry to an overrated, perhaps permanently impotent essayist. It’s clear enough that James would rather spend hours working himself up into an erection over Daffy Duck, Anne Heche and Charlton Heston. The answer: An editor looking for a train wreck, because the very notion of thinking about an interesting problem like the decline in poetry is too difficult and certainly not good enough for the money men.

If badmouthing poetry isn’t enough, James is ready to decimate Paglia over details that have little to do with the book in question. James has taken the opportunity to pull a Wieseltier here, spending a good chunk of his two pages spouting off ad hominen attacks rather than offering specific examples about why and where one should search Camille Paglia for the Number of the Beast. How dare this woman possess “wide knowledge” and “expressive gifts,” while daring to be a clear thinker “on top of a pair of Jimmy Choos!” To suggest (as the cover does) that James “fancies Camille Paglia” is as great a lie as claiming that a Democrat desires to give George Bush a hug.

What’s interesting is that James has very little to find fault with in the book. He declares that Break, Blow, Burn has “few sweeping statements.” He commends her comparison of Wallace Stevens’ “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock” with a Satie piano piece. Still unable to separate Paglia the thinker from Paglia the feminist, he points to Paglia’s defense of Ted Hughes as “a quixotic move.”

So why complain that Paglia’s “young students might listen too well?” What the hell does appearing in Inside Deep Throat have to do with the book in question? Why quibble over Ava Gardner being manufactured in a Hollywood studio when Paglia didn’t champion Gardner, but was merely inspired by her at a mere four years old?

Such smears are the telltale signs of a man looking for a fight, combing minutiae and finding nothing to support his argument. This is what’s known in the trade as ignoratio elenchi, or an irrelevant conclusion.

As such, we award Tanenhaus an F for fake, seriously considering the future of our Sunday New York Times subscription.

CONCLUSIONS:

Brownie Points Denied: 3

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[UPDATE: Bud Parr has an altogether different response to Clive James’ review.]

by DrMabuse

Tanenhaus Watch: February 27, 2005

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WEEKLY QUESTION: Will this week’s NYTBR reflect today’s literary and publishing climatet? Or will editor Sam Tanenhaus demonstrate yet again that the NYTBR is irrelevant to today’s needs? If the former, a tasty brownie will be sent to Mr. Tanenhaus’ office. If the latter, the brownie will be denied.

To determine this highly important question for our times, three tests will be conducted each week, along with ancillary commentary concerning the content.

THE COLUMN-INCH TEST:

Fiction Reviews: 1 full-page, 1 full-page round-up (4 books), 3 half-page reviews. (Total books: 8. Total space: 3.5 pages.)

Non-Fiction Reviews: 1 two-page, 3 half-page, 5 full-page reviews. (Total books: 9. Total space: 8.5 pages.)

While the number of books reviewed creates the illusion that the NYTBR is covering fiction, the column-inches reveal the truth! Of the 12 pages devoted to reviews, only 29.1% are for fiction. Tanenhaus has demonstrated yet again that he would rather devote his pages to yet another primer on Churchill (a gutless entry among many other poltiical essays, of which more anon) than concern himself with the exciting world of today’s literature.

While we’re always interested to see Tanenhaus experiment, we’ve long tired of Sam Tanenhaus’ hollow promises on the fiction front. And we will not rest until he devotes a minimum of 48% of his column inches to literature.

Brownie Point: DENIED!

THE HARD-ON TEST:

This test concerns the ratio of male to female writers writing for the NYTBR.

We find it strangely curious that of the five writers contributing to the fiction coverage, three of them are women and two of them are men. We applaud the diversity in coverage, while remaining extremely concerned that only one woman writer has contributed to the nine nonfiction reviews. Beyond this, where are the women for the features? We’d expect this kind of attitude at an Elks Lodge meeting. Surely, in a political atmosphere concerned with women’s issues and with Condi Rice as Secretary of State, Tanenhaus could have found a cross-section of women writers from varying perspectives to grace his pages.

Brownie Point: DENIED!

THE QUIRKY PAIR-UP TEST:

Fortunately, Sam Tanenhaus recovers from his disgrace by having William Vollmann write about Pol Pot. Vollmann’s essay is a good one: erudite, combining personal experience with an attentive read, calling Short on his hubris, and as obsessive as just about anything he’s written.

Then there’s Gore Vidal hoping to restore James Purdy’s reputation. Vidal’s essay (by his own admission) is self-serving. But it’s still nice to see some space in the NYTBR devoted to a forgotten literary figure — even if Jonathan Yardley does this on a weekly basis.

Brownie Point: EARNED!

CONTENT CONCERNS:

Michael Kazin calls Martin Van Buren “the Rodney Dangerfield of presidents” — the sad stretch of an editor demanding a populist metaphor. And why does the population’s perceived failure to understand Stephen Hawking deserve a lead paragraph? It is disturbing to see a newspaper with the New York Times‘ resources not only devoting so much of its space to these desperate attempts to appease Joe Sixpack, but cop to this anti-intellectual tone.

Aside from the priapic instapundits going out of their way to make politics about as exciting as stale muesli, the only real piss and vinegar to be found this week is in Albert Mobilio’s review of J.T. Leroy’s Harold’s End, which is declared “a shiny postcard of a book that offers a paper-thin impression of the author’s talents.”

Where are the daring takes on today’s books? Where’s the wit? The solid arguments that a major newspaper can disseminate among its readers?

CONCLUSIONS:

Brownie Points Earned: 1
Brownie Points Denied: 2

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