I thought of doing this; I’m glad someone got there before I did.
Eric, a reader, points UD in the direction of a wonderful piece of writing.
… that when she was a teenager she sang (standing with her guitar on the front porch of a house down the block from the house on Rokeby Avenue where she now lives) at a McGovern rally… And that she thinks she sang There But for Fortune...
It also reminds UD how impressed she was with the writing of this Laura Blumenfeld Washington Post article about McGovern’s daughter’s alcoholic death. It’s got precision, clarity, narrative shapeliness, and an attitude that’s humane but not sentimental. You remember writing like this, years and years later.
She was intelligent, funny, generous, charismatic, tender. She was a flop-down doorstep drunk.
All his life, George McGovern has been a textbook liberal, either an idealist or a sap, depending on your politics. He believes that human beings are improvable, that good intentions translate into good policy. He believes it is possible to intervene to solve people’s problems. He does not believe, did not believe, that at some level life is just a cold, lonely fight.
“My veins run with cheese, bratwurst, and a little Spotted Cow and some Miller,” Ryan said to cheers from the crowd.
Her writing was snappy, funny, hip, over the top, confiding… This essay about having small breasts is echt Ephron. She was desperate from a young age to be a visibly womanly woman, a woman — she quotes that hideous song from Annie Get Your Gun — “as soft and as sweet as a nursery.” For that, she needed very visible breasts, but hers never grew. She wore tiny ridiculous bras, then padded bras. A friend tries to cheer her up:
“When you get married,” Libby explained, “your husband will touch your breasts and rub them and kiss them and they’ll grow.”
But “no one would ever want to marry me. I had no breasts. I would never have breasts.”
She describes, throughout her life, “a never-ending stream of women who have made competitive remarks to me about breast size.” She remains “obsessed by breasts. … If I had had them, I would have been a completely different person.” Breasts are “the hang-up of my life.”
One nice thing about her breast essay is that it unexpectedly becomes more cranky and crazy and obsessed about the subject. Usually essays like these describe maturing into equanimity about a particular fixation, or experiencing some breakthrough moment that calms you down about it. Not Ephron’s.
Breasty friends of Ephron’s claim that the ridicule and unwelcome attention they’ve endured is worse than her small-breasted misery. She responds, by way of concluding her essay: “I think they are full of shit.”
*****************************
She’s right about that, by the way. They are full of shit. To have generous pretty breasts is a great thing – a source of erotic pleasure, obviously, and – given that Ephron shared a breast obsession with a billion or so men – a powerful attractor.
Judith Warner maps a comeback strategy for Dominique Strauss-Kahn which includes writing a memoir:
Possible title: “From J’Accuse to J’Accepte.”
… American lit class today.
She took a look at his Wikipedia page.
In the mid 1950s, Vonnegut worked very briefly for Sports Illustrated magazine, where he was assigned to write a piece on a racehorse that had jumped a fence and attempted to run away. After staring at the blank piece of paper on his typewriter all morning, he typed, “The horse jumped over the fucking fence,” and left.
… on last night’s debate.
Huntsman I can understand and appreciate. Perry is an empty bad suit. Romney lies with such facility it unnerves me. Bachmann is a fanatic, as, although I am extremely fond of him, is Ron Paul. Santorum just seems like a lost child from the 1950s, trying to have the campaign he dreamed about when he was ten. Cain is an egomaniac businessman with a talk show host patter and a mild wit. Gingrich is a giant, gaseous asshole.
Good writing doesn’t have to shout to be noticed.
Hilarious review of Erik Olin Wright’s latest book, by Russell Jacoby in Dissent. Excerpts:
… The book is startling and depressing evidence of what has happened to American academic Marxism, at least its sociological variant, over the last thirty years. It has become turgid, vapid, and self-referential. Wright lives in a bubble of like-minded sociologists and political theorists. On page 322, he thanks Marcia Kahn Wright, his wife, for suggesting to him “the term ‘interstitial’” as a way of expressing something about “strategic logic,” whatever that is. Apart from Mrs. Wright, Erik Wright’s favorite source is Erik Wright. He has read all of his works and finds them remarkable.
… We are only on page thirteen and already we have utopias that depend on a social science that depends on a theory of justice that breaks down into two parts, social and political, the first of which subdivides in three ways.
… Wright has to be given credit for parading his anticapitalist sensibilities, but his critique reads like a lecture at the hootenanny weekend of the Socialist Hiking Club, Berkeley Chapter… “Capitalism is efficient in certain crucial aspects.” “Capitalist commodification supports important broadly held values.” What sinks Wright’s little boat is exactly such vacuous and clumsy statements coupled, as they are, to a relentless faux precision of definitions, diagrams, and graphs.
… Wright [now warms] up for his ensuing discussions of “interstitial” and “symbiotic” transformation, which are numbingly baroque and that he clarifies with diagrams that might as well be satires. He gives us a graph of “Interstitial Transformations Paving the Way to Rupture” with one axis: “Historical Time.”
… [Wright] says little about anything. The empirical information he provides is perfunctory at best. His command of Marxism seems limited. His historical reach extends to his own earlier works. His vast theoretical apparatus is jimmy-rigged and empty. The graphs are inane, the writing atrocious. To call this book dull as dish water maligns dish water.
… In a blurb, Michael Burawoy, a previous president of the American Sociological Association and a prominent leftist sociologist, calls the book “encyclopedic” in its breadth and “daunting” in its ambition. He states, “Only a thinker of Wright’s genius could sustain such a badly needed political imagination without losing analytical clarity and precision.” With the correction that Wright is no genius and that the book is suffocatingly narrow in scope, impossibly cramped in imagination, and irreparably muddy in execution, the blurb is accurate.
Smokin’.
Canadian writers are this funny?
Air New Zealand has a refreshingly smutty ad campaign going on.
The Wall Street Journal reviews a new anthology of parodies. Here’s a nice one, a take on Sumer Is Icumen In:
Plumber is icumen in;
Bludie big tu-du.
Bloweth lampe and showeth dampe.
And dripth the wud thru.
Bludie hel, boo-hoo!