"No matter what the modernists say—or do—there is no getting away from the fact that a Corinthian column is a swell thing.”
- pseudonymous New Yorker critic T-Square in 1927, quoted in the Times’ always awesome Streetscapes column, this edition concerning 711 Fifth Avenue, the 1926 headquarters of the brand-new National Broadcasting Company.
T-Square really needs to be an architect-turned-rapper.
Good Times, Bad Times
Oh paper of record, how you keep us on our proverbial toes. I’m a day late on this, but Stanley Fish’s close reading of the Supreme Court opinions is the smartest thing I’ve read about the Citizens United case. And Gail Collins… we love Gail Collins, especially in full attack mode on the federal budget shenanigans:
Before the budget document even went out, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York had issued a scathing press release attacking plans to eliminate $5 million in grants to manufacturers of worsted wool.
“I will fight to make sure this proposal never sees the light of day,” said Schumer, who claimed that dropping the grants could ruin “Rochester’s iconic Hickey Freeman,” a men’s clothing company. It turned out that Hickey Freeman gets a different wool-manufacturer break entirely. Rochester is saved!
My own favorite target for extinction is a $9 million annual appropriation for museums and educational programs that highlight the “shared culture and tradition” of Alaskan Natives, Native Hawaiians and “children and families of Massachusetts.”
In other words, whaling.
This was originally the idea of Ted Kennedy and two colleagues from Alaska and Hawaii. Perhaps they had all just finished rereading “Moby-Dick” in a Senate book club.
Arr! Man the braces! However, in the same edition as Fish’s piece, the editors let this modifier dangle (since corrected):
Not the place for accidental humor. English class is the place for accidental humor. This is the example I use:
Before you feed meat to your dog, be sure to chop it up into little pieces.
Does Katie Roiphe Touch Sensitive Areas?
How We’re Literary Now: In A Bubble. Responses to Roiphe’s Great (White, Straight) Male Novelist piece are all over Tumblr—thoughtful, sharp, glib, funny, annoyed, appreciative, concise responses. Go to NYTimes.com, however, and Roiphe’s piece, which has had five days to circulate, is among neither the most emailed, most blogged or most searched. For those of us who care, let’s consider her piece adequately contextualized, refuted or seconded.
But are the works she discusses sexy?
Strictly from a craft point of view, I think her examples demonstrate how going into great detail about character reactions is at odds with making what those characters are experiencing come alive. Maybe this is inextricable from thematic concerns and shows the egotism at the root of these works, as if the writers Roiphe cites would actually just as soon hold forth about sex in a smoking ban-flouting bar than have sex. But substitute different subject matter and perspective—say, Thoreau enjoying his pond—and I think there’d be the same process of abstraction and removing us from the experience itself. I’m wary of the old MFA chestnut “show don’t tell,” but it came from somewhere. For sex scenes, Roiphe’s examples can be awfully non-tactile.
Conversely, at times their focus is too microscopic. View something too closely, and it’s easy to lose sight of its shape.
Edmund White, introducing Amy Hempel at a 2008 reading, said that reading her work made it impossible to imagine writing like Updike anymore. One can get lost in the funhouse of lavish prose. White could have equally been praising Carver or Chekhov. They all work short (vs. Roiphe’s doorstoppers) and they don’t specify how to think or what something means. They ask us to participate.
Just Like Fashion It's A Passion For The With It And Hip
The Times gins up some page views compares Michelle Obama’s and Sarah Palin’s style. In making the two women a focal point for the year, the piece veers from lists of peripherally related issues to what their choices seem to typify so that initially it’s hard to find a main idea other than: look! (Poor Cindy McCain. No style piece for you).
For some reason, both the Times and I think of Michelle by first name and Palin by last name (check the file names for the slide shows).
Both women look terrific. But as the article goes on, it decides that it feels antagonistic towards Michelle. Of her choices in labels it says:
[They] are all insider, apart from her shorts and those strategically worn plebe numbers from Target and Talbots. If she got any more insider, she’d be backing down a runway. She wears Rodarte, Jason Wu, Sophie Theallet, Narciso Rodriguez, Thakoon, Isabel Toledo and Rick Owens, labels that in terms of creativity and price are at the highest level of fashion. Go much higher and you hit couture.
Sly writing, relying on a winked shared assumption (insider=bad) without offering a rationale. There are the kind of ‘insider’ things that make no sense without a reference point (4chan jokes, for example), and there are the kind of ‘insider’ things that those on the outside may not know or care that they’re missing. And maybe Michelle likes to showcase up-and-coming designers. But no:
continue reading Just Like Fashion It's A Passion For The With It And Hip
"The Decade We Had"
Ten writers. Eight Men. Two Women. Really, Times?
Colum McCann, however, rocks 2008:
Fiction deals elegantly with issues that politics eventually wrestles with, corrupts, destroys, but nothing specific had been written to prepare me for President Obama. I wasn’t able to align him with any fiction, and yet it seemed that so much of literature has worked toward the moment. From Vladimir Nabokov to Aleksandar Hemon to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, American literature has always been prepared to take in the “other.” It has also allowed writers to hold onto their own country, so that they can have their hands in the warmth — or bitter cold — of both places.
There's A Metaphor In Here Somewhere
Remember the episode of the 1980s Twilight Zone in which everyone around our hero gradually begins speaking a kind of nonsense English, with apparently standard syntax and intonation, but words transposed with no discernible logic? And everyone else understands one another… Our hero’s first indication of a problem should come when his wife refers to lunch as ‘dinosaur,’ but—of course—he corrects her silly mistake.
I had a similarly disorienting moment reading this:
Abkhazia isn’t a district out of Harry Potter but the breakaway territory that’s not South Ossetia, and Russia is paying good money for recognition of its independence:
Nauru, the world’s smallest republic, has been desperate for income since its most important resource, phosphates formed by centuries of bird droppings, is nearly exhausted. The island has tried housing refugees for Australia and investing millions in a West End musical. (It bombed.)
(A little respect, Times?)
