Nathan Burke once said, “Get out of the freight car or I’ll kick your bitchy little ass, Mr. Siegel,” and for Adam Bellow whiny little essays like this one were considered “the spoils of nepotism.” Kafka once asked Max Brod to burn his writing, fearing that a shrimpy little weasel named Lee Siegel would quote him in a century. (What a mess that would make.) We know now thanks to Lee Siegel that you can turn in the world’s most incomprehensibly idiotic essay and still collect a paycheck from the New York Times Book Review. A modest question arises, however: If Lee Siegel is such a legend in his own mind, why is it that his ego continues to be fed by the Gray Lady? When Lee Siegel bangs like an autistic monkey on his keyboard, you’re in big trouble. I mean, big trouble.
Let’s start with a couple of harmless tests. If you’ve read Siegel’s essay and didn’t want to stab yourself after the first paragraph, did you want to stab yourself after the second? First, try to wonder why Siegel feels the need to name-drop six literary names in the first paragraph. Don’t worry, I couldn’t tell you either. Could it be that Siegel has nothing interesting to say about anything? Once you recover this primal state of being after getting past the second paragraph, Siegel tells us, you will then take off your brassiere or your boxers for Mr. Siegel. You will hand him your credit card and he will spend the entire day maxing it out, ruining your hard-earned credit with a spate of 1-900 calls. Volunteers?
Now, I never swallowed when Siegel asked. Nor did I suck him off at any point. Lee Siegel’s downfall was his Dubya-like insistence that he was right, that he was funny, and that he had some scintilla of talent. His undoing arrived — well, how many undoings were there really? The cowardly sock puppet at the New Republic? The tendency to hold any panel or discussion hostage? The inability to act or think like a grown-up?
Well, enough of Lee Siegel. And enough with this parody. My girlfriend pointed me to the article, knowing damn well that I would want to kick this sad sack of a man when he’s down. So let us conclude this entry by pointing out the obvious fact: if Bruno Kirby were still alive, he’d play the role of Lee Siegel in the inevitable movie.
The Call by Yannick Murphy: The always interesting author of Here They Come and Signed, Mata Hari returns with a novel that whips up a worldview from a rather quirky set of limitations: namely, the call logs that a veterinarian maintains as his son is unexpectedly put into a coma and an unforgiving economy denies him work. What emerges is a surprisingly optimistic, often funny, and very moving account on how one family uses acceptance and forgiveness as a way to atone for hard knocks. (
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber: Forget Franzen and Eugenides. If you're looking for a social novel that counts, Diana Abu-Jaber is the author you're looking for. Building from the free-form exploration of consciousness and identity in Crescent and the gripping procedural structure of Origin, Abu-Jaber's latest novel is her finest, equally fluent with gutterpunk culture and smarmy real estate men. It has been suggested by The Washington Post's Ron Charles that you will likely gain some pounds while reading this novel. This is certainly true. Abu-Jaber's description of food is so precise that it often made me want to do more cooking. But I very much admired the way in which Abu-Jaber presents all her characters as unwitting victims of rough capitalism, which permits them some dignity even as they perform terrible acts.
The Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: This memoir isn't so much about the decline of the Times Square peepshow, as it is about one young woman's efforts to pull herself up by by her bootstraps when presented with few economic options. Filled with self-introspective candor and a quiet dignity, McClear's story is one that might befall any of us in these volatile times. While McClear does get back on her feet, her book leads one contemplating the terrible fates of other young women now moving to New York and falling into deadlier vocations. (
Shorter L. Siegel: All fiction is a sham since I’m too stupid to understand it.
Aww…what do you have against poor Mr. Kirby?
I saw this and thought, ah, Ed will go ballistic…
Siegel could always take up scrapbooking. I hear non-readers enjoy it.