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Author / DrMabuse
Tanenhaus Watch: February 27, 2005
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
TOP JIMMY: Gore Vidal
[EDITOR’S NOTE: The great Jimmy Beck, a fantastic literary enthusiast who has made guest appearances at The Old Hag and Maud Newton, has offered the first in what I hope will be a semi-regular series that I’ve tentatively entitled “TOP JIMMY,” whereby the great Beck observes literary figures at bookstores and readings, and weighs in. His first subject is Gore Vidal.]
BECK: If you were to read a transcript of Gore Vidal?s remarks at the Regulator Bookshop in Durham, NC on Friday afternoon and use this alone as the basis for your impression, you?d probably come away thinking, ?Jeez, what a grumpy old bastard.? And sure, Vidal is full of bile and righteous indignation about the Bush administration.
But he?s also a lively conversationalist and a true raconteur. His comments were leavened with humor: ?These guys [Bush and Cheney] have turned me into creationists?Darwin was wrong!? And of course, it?s hard to imagine anyone else who knows so much about US history. His faculties remain undiminished by the fact he?ll turn 80 this year or that he now walks haltingly with the aid of a cane (he recently had knee surgery). He speaks in a deep baritone and, while regaling the packed house with his inexhaustible supply of anecdotes, treated us to spot-on imitations of JFK, Eleanor Roosevelt, FDR, Orson Welles and W (natch).
Not surprisingly, most of his remarks — and the questions directed at him — were political in nature. The sympathetic lefty audience looked to him to answer questions along the lines of ?What the hell has happened to us as a nation over the last few years?? — a subject Vidal was happy to expound upon at length.
He was in town to assist with a revival of his play, The March to the Sea, a Civil War drama being performed at Duke University (that?s ?DuPont? for all you Tom Wolfe fans).
On the media:
Having just read the New York Times, Vidal said that Paul Krugman was the only reason to even pick up the paper anymore. ?The media is totally corrupt from top to bottom and paid for by the same interests that bought and paid for this administration.?
On Iraq:
?[The administration] seems to feel [it?s] watching a bad movie or a video game. Something?s gone wrong in the American psyche.?
On funny business during the US election:
?[Rep. John] Conyers [D-MI] went to Ohio during the election and has got a lot of material, but we may not get to hear about it. Silence at Appomattox, as it were.?
On Freedom and Democracy:
?We had freedom once, but never democracy. But if you go to an airport today, you know you?re not terribly free.?
On why we vote against our own self-interests:
?That?s the American way.? He went on to blame the media, saying that if a lie gets repeated often enough people will believe it. Here?s where he invoked Welles and War of the Worlds. ?I asked [Welles] once if he realized the ramifications of what he was doing [by broadcasting a fictional invasion from Mars]?? Welles said, ?No I didn?t. I didn?t realize people were that crazy.??
On the prospect of another constitutional convention:
The professional liberals (or professional cowards as I call them) worry about what the bad guys will get hold of [if we have another convention]. Well, they?re getting hold of it anyway. Jefferson thought there should be a convention every 30 years. He said, ?You can?t expect a boy to wear a man?s jacket.??
On the US?s role in the world:
?We are part of the concert of nations. We should play the oboe. Or the triangle.?
On the right wing media?s treatment of Hillary Clinton:
?Suddenly she was a lesbian who murdered her male lover [Vince Foster]. If I were writing that script, I would have at least said ?female lover.??
On John Kerry:
Vidal described Kerry in the 1950s as being ?ruthlessly on the make? for Janet Auchincloss, Jackie?s younger half-sister (and a relative of Vidal?s). Vidal said that Kerry wanted nothing more than to become a relation of JFK?s. He then brought up Kerry?s statement that he would have voted for the war even had he known there were no WMDs, which Vidal referred to sarcastically as ?very statesmanlike.?
On prospective leaders for the Democrats to lead them out of the desert:
?I don?t think you can look to individuals.? One notable exception in history: Lincoln.
On Ronald Reagan:
?The most crashing bore. But a very nice man. He always read all of the jokes in Reader?s Digest.?
On reasons for optimism:
?We have a great capacity to change our minds?look at Prohibition. And as we grow more broke, China will outdo us. Once we cease being imperial, we?ll be calling the troops home.?
On the book of his he wishes more people would read:
?Inventing a Nation. It?s Madison, Washington and Jefferson in their own words.?
On the internet and the emergence of blogs:
?The internet gave us Howard Dean. He not only raised money, he fueled people [to become politically active]. At the big march against the war, I spoke to 100,000 people on Hollywood Boulevard. Of course, the L.A. Times called it ?a scanty crowd.??
On television:
?I don?t watch the programming. I just watch the commercials.? He then launched into a perfect infomercial voice. Returning to the subject later: ?We know the attention span has snapped.?
On religion:
He talked about how religion was not much of a force in American life in the 1940s and said that TV evangelists had a lot to do with changing that. Here he did his best 700 Club TV preacher impersonation?priceless. He also called for revocation of religious organizations? tax-exempt status, calling it ?a vast source of revenue.?
On southern cuisine:
?You?ve got the best smoked ham, grits and gravy. I asked for a ham sandwich the other day and you can?t get one?or you get the rubberized kind.? I asked my mother once what the 19th century was like. She said, ?Well, the food was awfully good.??
On what he?s reading now:
?The History of the Peloponnesian War, and again and again, The Federalist Papers.?
On what kind of gay novel he would write today (versus The City and the Pillar in 1948):
?A pretty dour one.? He then said he rejected the terms of the question. ?There?s no such thing as a gay person. There?s only sex, which is a continuum. ?Homosexual? is an adjective to describe actions, not people. Neither Latin nor Greek has a word for it?it?s just sex.?
On reviews:
?I remember the review of my first novel (Williwaw, 1946). It said, ?Mr. Vidal has posed the problem but offers no solution.? Well, [the book] was a tragedy, for God?s sake. What am I supposed to say? That Sophocles wanted me to end it this way??
On the fate of literary fiction:
?Fiction? Well there?s always The Wall Street Journal.? Rimshot. ?Fiction has dropped to where poetry was when I started. I don?t know if the written word can ever come back. I tell ambitious writers to go and read Montaigne.?
(Thanks, Jimmy Beck!)
Joe Camp Presents Benjamin the Haunted
Up until Wednesday night, I didn’t believe in the afterlife. However, I was swayed from my skepticism when a Wiccan friend of mine, whom I had met through the personals section of my local alt-weekly rag, took my hasty notion of what Walter Benjamin might think about the Bush administration very much to my heart. My Wiccan friend (whom I shall refer to in these pages as “Broom Hither”) pushed me down onto her bed, tied me up with several painful strands of tight rope, carved a pentagram into my chest, and then demanded that I bark like a dog.
To her supreme credit, Broom Hither had delivered on every single promise she had pledged that evening. And since I was already bleeding profusely and had no wish to stain Broom Hither’s expensive carpet, I howled like a Baskerville hound while Broom Hither let loose a heinous farrago of salty aromas, pungent candles and various other paraphernalia designed to badger my sinus and presumably the olfactory senses of the dead.
While it’s safe to say that I won’t be dating a Wiccan again, I have consulted a plastic surgeon about what he can do about the pentagram scar on my chest. The answer is: not much. But it was all worth it. Because Broom Hither did manage to coax the spirit of Walter Benjamin to offer us two paragraphs from the Great Beyond, which I am happy to publish on these pages. Mr. Benajamin has not only been paying remarkable attention to current U.S. politics, but has, in fact, ably mastered the English language in the sixty-five years since his suicide.
What follows is Sections 4 and 5 of Mr. Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of Idiots:
The human struggle, which is rarely present to a yokel influenced by White Zinfandel in a box and monster truck rallies, is a fight for the crude and avaricious desires which are often mistaken for upward mobility and, indeed, success. It is rarely the crude ones who allow for idiocy to rise, but the master manipulators in power who maintain the facade of idiocy. As American society has gravitated towards media mirages (c.f., reality television), the crude now see slim possibilities in their own futures. Thus, and I have not studied this as long as I would have liked, it remains my conviction that idiocy is allowed to flourish.
Please see Section IV.
At this point, Mr. Benjamin disappeared in a sepia haze. It is worth noting that he had no sympathy about my bleeding chest. However, he did admonish me for associating “arcades” with Mr. Do. So perhaps his lack of empathy was justifiable.
I have since learned that Broom Hither can be found in California’s Megan’s Law database. I suppose this is what happens when one lets common sense languish so that one may get laid.
Whatever the case, Broom Hither has disappeared from her residence. She has apparently listed me as her designated contact and I am flagging off the requests of dunners, creditors, and even a landlord from three years ago.
I will confess that I am not sufficiently familiar enough with Mr. Benjamin to corroborate his identity. It is quite possible that I was still reeling from the trauma. However, I leave this record up so that greater experts than I can make sense of Mr. Benjamin’s message from beyond.
There’s Also This New Rap Thing That Causes Teenagers to Shoot Each Other Up in the Streets!
I don’t know who this Michelle Malkin person is. But her claim that emo is a soundboard for self-mutiliation is instantly deflated when she declares emo as “a new genre of music.” Jesus, I’m over 30 too. But even I’ve listened to Sunny Day Real Estate. It was the dirty white sheets that were cut into strips, not the flesh.
As for this “new genre of music,” I’ve got two words for you, Michelle: Ian MacKaye.
You know, in a court of law, you can’t file a complaint without stating a statute. Having a supporting argument is one of those nifty things that maintain due process and keep a good subject matter convincing. The ignorance with which these so-called “higher beings” dispense their wisdom amuses me. But I’m troubled by how many hangers on are duped by their faux punditry.