BREAKING OUT THE WOODEN PROSE-O-METER [Starts with an absolutely terrible title. There's nothing clever here, and it's also rather confusing as to meaning.]

There was a curious detail in The New Yorker's recent, none-wished-it-longer profile of real estate and media tycoon Mortimer Zuckerman. The longtime chairman [Repetition of longer/longtime not good.] of Boston Properties, Zuckerman writes a weekly column for U.S. News & World Report, which he owns. Here is how he goes about it:

"Generally, Zuckerman reads up on his column subjects on the weekends, underlining as he goes. He writes early in the week, dictating a first draft of the column over the phone to a secretary in Mexico City. She transcribes his musings, and sends them to him; he fiddles and dictates anew, until he has a workable draft."

Inhale. These New Yorker paragraphs run on for ever. Exhale. [Inhale/Exhale fun, but you kind of have to think about it.]

"('I wish that I could write with metaphors, but I just try to marshal the facts as well as I can,' he said.) Then, typically, he sends it to Harry Evans, the eminent newspaperman and publisher. Characterizations of Evans's contribution vary, depending on which former editor of the magazine you talk to. Evans calls his round 'a conventional dust job.'"

Wow. Phoned down to Mexico City; more fiddling and dictating; multiple drafts; touched up by the legendary former editor of the London Sunday Times. [The wow's good. And he's already insinuating that all this fiddling actually isn't wow.]

So why are the columns so bad? How come they read as if -- metaphor comes naturally to me -- they were written with a trowel? [Trowel's great, as in just lays it on.]

How bad are Zuckerman's columns? They are pretty awful, a solid 8.7 on the Wooden Prose-o-Meter, where the typical Eleanor Clift or Clarence Page outing scores a perfect 10. [The o-meter thing just isn't working here. Too tired. It is itself a species of woodenness.] They are awful because they are boring and predictable, which is the last thing an opinion column should be.

Let's flit through some recent work. Zuckerman offers up a dutiful, by-the-numbers hand-wringing about Don Imus: "Imus has helped reset the boundaries of acceptable speech. But we must go further, reawakening awareness of the unmet needs of our society." [Great selection. How much more pompous and vapid can you get than the unmet needs of our society?] And of course an in-crowd abrazo for New York mayor Michael Bloomberg: "He has governed in a common-sense, adult, nonideological manner." Doubtless it is so. [Abrazo's embrace. Nice offbeat word. Good. But I'm not sure his "Doubtless it is so" is doing the work he means it to do -- I mean, being sarcastic. It's not quite strong enough.]

Separately, Zuckerman frets over the disturbing political insurgency of Senator Barack Obama: "He must grow." Of course he frets big-time over the Hamas insurgency in Gaza and the West Bank. Zuckerman saves his worst writing for the subject he cares about most -- the state of Israel -- because he fancies himself a player in Mideast politics. To wit: "The stakes are high. This is a time not for rolling the dice but for prudent, tough-minded diplomacy and realism. Or else we are doomed to repeat the past failures." What? No "Time will tell"? Perhaps that was in a previous column. [Excellent. I giggled a bit at this ridicule of the stupefying cliches Zuckerman's elaborately-edited work produces.]

Zuckerman writes with the moribund evenhandedness of someone worried that he might not be invited back to A-list dinner parties. [Here's where satirists need to be careful. The sentence is great until Beam gets to A-list dinner parties, which is itself a cliche, and a rather dumb populist one at that.] Which is curious, since he hosts about one-half of them. On Israel, I'd much rather read Marty Peretz from the right or Eric Alterman from the left. To paraphrase the Book of Revelations, Zuckerman on the Middle East is neither hot nor cold; I spew him out.

Maybe I should ease up on the former Hub resident who calls Cambridge a "suburb" of Boston; did U.S. News fire all the fact-checkers too? The fact is that any jackass can write an opinion column and many do. [Repetition of fact not so hot; also, he needs a transition -- maybe a new paragraph -- to the jackass point.] Zuckerman's work matches up nicely with syndicated scribblers like Susan Estrich, Bill O'Reilly, or the Emperor of All Received Wisdom, David Gergen. [Again, Emperor, etc., just falls flat. It's too broad a species of satire.] When I applied for a fellowship years ago, the first words out of my mouth were: "I am a newspaper columnist, but that doesn't mean I am an idiot." [Probably should have begun the piece with this.]

So who does columns right? Marc Fisher of the Washington Post, whom I don't get to read often, may be the best reporter/writer/commentator at a big newspaper. Ron Rosenbaum at the weekly New York Observer could really cook. Whether writing about Shakespeare, Bob Dylan, or Yale's secret society Skull and Bones, Rosenbaum pursued ideas to the very end, with fussy, envy-inducing prose. [Not sure fussy's the right word here.]

Michael Kinsley is probably the best newspaper columnist of my generation, but he's really a magazine guy, so we don't have to feel threatened.

Me? Let others judge. I'd love to hold forth longer, but I have to phone some of these thoughts down to Mexico City. [Very good. Nicely revisits this absurdity.] These deadlines creep up quicker than a bobcat with slippers on. Oh, look -- a metaphor! I must be doing something right. [Actually, I think that's a simile...]

THE WORST OP-ED EVER WRITTEN? [Again, a terrible title. Unless the essay to come is the cleverest, most definitive decimation of a piece of writing ever. Which it's not. One reason it's not, right up front: Cast your eye down the page. It's way too long. You want to get in and get out of these things pretty quickly -- after all, they're talking about a short, pretty superficial bit of prose; and the more you rant on, the more the thing seems to be about you, which is death on wheels for this sort of writing. It shouldn't be about your resentment or irritation or disdain; it should be about the prose.]



It was Aug. 5, and Professor Stanley Fish, the famous postmodernist and "guest columnist" [Already the bizarre and unhelpful use of quotation marks. Why the marks? Does he mean to suggest that Fish isn't a guest columnist? That guest columnist is a pretentious formulation? WHAT?] for the New York Times, had some breaking news to expound upon in an op-ed piece. He had discovered a new development in American culture that deserved the kind of exegesis only he could deliver: the appearance of a new kind of coffee place. [Expound... exegesis... Rosenbaum thinks using these fancy words satirizes what he sees as the intellectual pomposity of Fish. But they're not working this way; they're just vague snark-markers...]

Have you heard about these new coffee places? Professor Fish's column made it seem as though they had never been noticed or discussed before. [Drop second sentence. It's sentences like this one that make this far too long a piece.]

"Getting Coffee Is Hard To Do" was the title of his essay, which in its self-satisfied cluelessness may just qualify as the worst op-ed ever written. [Rosenbaum's shooting off his guns far too soon. And he's telling rather than showing -- he's name-calling rather than doing what, say, Christopher Hitchens does so well -- cunningly, calmly, working the prose of his adversary so as to expose, amid gradually building hilarity on the part of the reader, its stupidity.] (I'm not sure if "Worst Ever" will become a recurrent feature in this space, but my column on "The Worst Celebrity Profile Ever Written" (Esquire's pretentiously fawning profile of "the best woman in the world," Angelina Jolie) stirred up some useful controversy.) [Bad idea to mention in a self-aggrandizing way an earlier column he's written along these lines. Makes this one look like a lazy effort to replicate that success.]

At the very least, Fish's column showcases what happens when certain academics descend from the ivory tower to offer us their special insights on popular culture. [UD's got nothing against anti-professor rhetoric, but this is really meager stuff.]

Not that Fish would cop to living in a tower. The professor took great pains to demonstrate that he is not one of those academics who mingle among the commoners for a mere 20 minutes or so before pronouncing on their baffling customs. [Why is the satire falling flat here? One reason is that it's simply very badly written, clogged with adjectives - great, mere, baffling - which dilute the force of the writing and account for its length.]

It seems that professor Fish is a real man of the people who has been getting his coffee served to him amidst the regular folk for years, at the kind of place where you could order your coffee and cheese Danish, and "twenty seconds later, tops, they arrived, just as you were settling into the sports page."

You can tell he's a down-to-the-earth guy, not some pointy-headed intellectual, because he uses phrases like "twenty seconds later, tops" and reads "the sports page."

But our professor seems to think he has encountered a brand-new cultural phenomenon: coffee places that are disturbingly different from the lunch counters of yesteryear.

Well, I did a little Googling, and it turns out he's right! There are hosts of these coffee chain stores, including one with the improbable name Starbucks, infiltrating our cities. I don't understand why the Times' cutting-edge "Styles" section hasn't done something on this before. Wake up and smell the coffee, "Styles" section editors! [Comes across as protesting too much, pleasing himself, stretching out to admire his irony... ]

It turns out these new coffee places are incredibly difficult to navigate, even for a brilliant academic like professor Fish.

Here's how he describes his harrowing experience: "As you walk in, everything is saying, 'This is very sophisticated and you'd better be up to it.' "

Of course, we know that professor Fish is being ironic here. Some might say condescendingly so. From his tone, we know that the elements of what he mockingly describes as "sophistication" — "wood or concrete floors, lots of earth tones, soft, high-style lighting, open barrels of coffee beans, folk-rock and indie music, photographs of urban landscapes, and copies of The Onion" — aren't true sophistication to a man of professor Fish's discernment. They're kitsch, faux-sophistication — and you can't fool him. He can see right through it! [It's quite damaging to Rosenbaum's case that this short excerpt in which Fish describes the place's interior is superior to anything Rosenbaum has so far written.]

Although at this point you begin to wonder if his op-ed wasn't meant to be a feature in The Onion ("Area professor befuddled by coffee place"), Fish is apparently serious about the profound difficulty this new cultural phenomenon presents. [Most readers have stopped reading by now. Rosenbaum is excruciating in his insistence on chewing at this prose...]

In any case, professor Fish's description of his terrifying encounter with this coffee store is enough to make a grown man weep [Wan cliche.]:

First, unlike his previous coffee shop, which evidently was never crowded, you have to get in line [!] and wait to be served for more than 20 seconds, tops. In fact, "You may have one or two people in front of you who are ordering a drink with more parts than an internal combustion engine." Oh the humanity! [DOA cliche.]

What's worse, these, these PEOPLE, whoever they are, use unfamiliar terms: "something about 'double shot,' 'skinny,' 'breve,' 'grande,' 'au lait' and a lot of other words that never pass my lips."

Not only are they unfamiliar, practically indecipherable, these terms (what could au lait possibly mean? It doesn't even sound like English!), you virtually have to sound them out to read them. They are, furthermore, literally, unspeakably vulgar to a man of educated taste. (They "never pass my lips" — imagine if a man of his intellectual distinction had to say au lait!) [Sorry baby. You're all worked up, but it ain't working. You're overdoing.]

And by the way, you satirists and improv comics out there. Why haven't you picked up on this elaborate coffee-name trend and made fun of it? That new show I've heard of, Seinfeld, could really get some mileage out of those funny names for coffee sizes. Tall is small! Comedy gold! (I myself have tangled with Starbucks, though mostly back in the day when Seinfeld was still on the air. But my tiffs were with its management, not with the 20-second-plus wait or the beleaguered baristas.)

But professor Fish's ordeal does not end with the profoundly confusing names, confusing even for someone who specializes in language. (And I should say here I am an admirer of his early, pre-postmodern work Surprised by Sin, a controversial study of Milton's Paradise Lost.) [Any reader still with Rosenbaum is befuddled at this point. Suddenly he's expressing respect -- but are we sure it's non-ironic respect? -- for Fish's scholarly work... Rosenbaum's tone is all over the place, and tone is crucial in hit pieces like this.]

No, the ordeal continues even after you master the ordering process: "[Y]ou get to put in your order, but then you have to find a place to stand while you wait for it."

Professor Fish is particularly good on the inhuman stress positions this requires of him. "[Y]ou shift your body, first here and then there, trying to get out of the way of those you can't help get in the way of."

How he maintains his priceless sense of humor in this Abu Ghraib-like environment of torment is hard to imagine. But it gets worse. You can bump into people and spill coffee, and it's hard to find a seat. I'm not kidding. (Well, he isn't.) [No selectivity here at all. Far more effective to use one or at most two of Fish's comments against him... It feels pathological for Rosenbaum to gas on like this.]

But there's more! "[T]hen your real problems begin," he says with stoic grit. Some readers, the faint of heart, may want to skip this next part, because things really get ugly: the "accessories" difficulty. (Note to self: Tell agent about plans for thriller to rival The Bourne Ultimatum — The Accessories Difficulty.)

You must face "a staggering array" of "things you put in, on and around your coffee ... " Here, he's referring to such highly fraught choices as sugar or Splenda, whole milk or skim. High stakes choices, with so little time to tease out the implications and consequences. What's more, there's no service person to help him make these terrible decisions. "[S]o you lunge after one thing and then after another with awkward reaches."

At this point, one can sympathize not so much with professor Fish as with the Times op-ed editors who had to come up with a "pull quote" for the hard-copy edition. You know, the pithy phrase that billboards the column's essence. Here's what they came up with:

"Cream? Sugar? Get it yourself."

I think that about captures the unbearable excitement of these revelations. Oh, the exquisite, um, awkwardness of those "awkward reaches"! But he "got it himself" despite the indignity. And he lived to tell about it. And make it relevant! In fact, one can see a hint of professor Fish's signature moral relativism — known in the lit-crit trade as anti-foundationalism — creep into his prose as he attempts to grapple with the accessories difficulty.

"There is no 'right' place to start," he notes, no solid philosophical foundation upon which to base difficult sweetener decisions. As with the most difficult questions of philosophy, politics, and literature, there are only subjective perspectives.

He is once again face to face with the tragedy of the human situation.

But he's got a much larger point to make. The dread "New Coffee Experience" turns out to be emblematic of one of the key ills of modern times, the servant problem:

It is "just one instance of the growing practice of shifting the burden of labor to the consumer — gas stations, grocery and drug stores, bagel shops (why should I put on my own cream cheese?), airline check-ins, parking lots."

Imagine, a man of his distinction, forced to "put on my own cream cheese." Why is there no one to do it for him?

He might have mentioned ATMs. Used to be you could walk into a bank and ask a teller to give you a couple hundred bucks, and they'd hand it over, "twenty seconds, tops." No troubling paperwork, remember? And what about credit card machines? Now, it's "insert this, swipe that, choose credit or debit, enter your PIN, push the red button, error, start again."

One wants to feel sympathy for professor Fish in his distress. But although most of the unintentional humor in professor Fish's column comes from his comic cluelessness about things he thinks are "new" in the culture, this note of entitlement gives it a kind of nasty edge. [We're totally not with the writer by now. We're not necessarily with Fish, but we're nowhere near the writer's sensibility and response. This piece became a dud in the fourth or fifth paragraph; anyone still chugging along is a marm or a Duke student whose dissertation defense Fish failed.]

He concedes toward the close of his column: "[N]one of us has chosen to take over the jobs of those we pay to serve us."

Is it just me, or is there something grating in that phrase: "those we pay to serve us"? So distasteful, the life of the servant class, compared with the life of the mind.

But at least in the old days the servant class hopped to it and got professor Fish his coffee and Danish in "20 seconds, tops" and worked themselves to the point of exhaustion all day for less than a minimum wage to make sure he would have something to consume with his "sports page."

As multidegreed as he is, I have a feeling that it would be an invaluable addition to his education if professor Fish spent a week "serving" as a barista. You know: For someone who believes in perspectives rather than foundations (except when it comes to grants), it would seem like a useful additional perspective on the whole coffee-servant question. [The parenthetical snark about grants is just mystifying.]

He also might want to consider that, while in some ways we do more ourselves these days, some of us might just prefer that to having servants? Just another perspective.

Still, the column makes clear why his kind of deep thinking has earned him academic stardom and university deanships. Such a man deserves to be served. Not to have to serve himself. [Rosenbaum doesn't believe any of this shit. He's just going with his formula.]

In any case, the op-ed may not have been a total loss; it might suggest the subject for his next magnum opus: Surprised by Starbucks.

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