for 15 February 2000. Updated every WEEKDAY.
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Addled Brains Nice job! I wasn't surprised by Michael Woolf's take, which always seems to gauge people in terms of social status, but the Lubow piece was strangely credulous of claims to her sainthood and brilliance. And how about the photo of her on the book jacket which must be 20 years old? Cynthia Cotts <ccotts@villagevoice.com> To say nothing of the text beneath the book jacket photo, which speaks volumes about Renata's leviathan self-image and clotted, Germanic punctuation style: "Renata Adler has had an unrivaled career as a reporter; novelist, and short story writer; intellectual gadfly; and New Yorker staffer. Educated at Bryn Mawr, Harvard, the Sorbonne, and Yale Law school, she has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fulbright Scholar, a Woodrow Wilson Scholar, and the film critic of The New York Times. The author of prize-winning short stories, a prize-winning novel (Speedboat), and countless admired and controversial articles for The New Yorker, New York Review of Books, The Atlantic Monthly, National Review, New Republic and other publications, she lives in New York." You know, somehow I think her career was rivaled, and those stories probably could be counted, if someone were really determined. (Just two get the ball rolling, I count two uses of the phrase "prize-winning," four snooty institutions of higher learning, and the names of three prestigious fellowships herein....) Your uncredentialed, quanitfiable, and extremely rivaled correspondent, Holly Martins  "It serves to remind you how unwholesome, gnat-straining, and sanity-threatening it is to fetishize a magazine as your all-purpose culture arbiter." Suck ? Cheers, Jeff Richardson <jeffr@bf.rmit.edu.au> No, you see, at Suck we always, always leave the doors closed. Holly Martins Out of Luck Subject: zzzz, snore, Fags ... I guess you do have to supply fodder for the local pillow biters. Guess I'll give Suck a miss for another month. Roy Taylor <roy@eagle-marketing.com> Don't worry, little pillow biter. We'll have some queer content in another month just for you. Yours, Jonathan Filler Subject: Incompetence Dear Polly, The reason I write is to bring your attention to a recent result in psychology which you might use. A couple of psychologists did a study which indicated that people who were incompetent at some particular task (a written test, I think) thought they were much more competent than they were. Meanwhile, the high-scorers on the test thought they were somewhat less competent than they actually were. Leonard <leonard@dc.net> This is not the best news for those of us whose self-esteem has about the price-to-earnings ratio of some of your more grossly overvalued Internet stocks. Oh my god, what a metaphor. At any rate, that study provides just one more bit of proof that the overconfident should stay the hell away from the stock market. Overconfident low-scorer, Polly Are you having it, or something? Where is the blazing wit that I look forward to? You must be having sex. It slows your brain down. You know that. Cut it out. Sincerely, Josh Schoof <josh@kevco.cx> My brain is slow because I visit my dwindling Amazon shares too frequently to wish them well. To whisper, "Buck up, little campers!" But your letter is a clear case of projection. Keep rationalizing that uneventful sex life of yours! Good things come to those who rationalize. Blazing git, Polly Addled Brains Ms Martins, Great article on Adler! You are as funny and much more incisive than the other Suck writers I've read. But it seems you are just as cynical. If not The New Yorker, what is your candidate for best literary magazine? And do you really think the Tina Brown years brought The New Yorker back to its roots of a wide middle-class audience? It would be nice to have Suck sometimes show an ounce of respect toward a person or an institution. Or maybe that's just too against type. If so, what do you recommend as balance for the destructive, wonderful wit of Suck? Thanks for the piece, Jacob Klein <jacob_klein@yahoo.com> Thanks for your kind words. I wouldn't exactly say Tina Brown did the old eminence grise a world of good, since her contributions tended distinctly toward the faux-titillating middlebrow (e.g., Susan Faludi's excursis on the porn industry, Richard Avedon's Weimar-knockoff photo spreads of semi-clad models cavorting with skeletons) and the flat-out celebrity-addled (e.g., her own personal interview with President Butthead and her reminiscence of the doe-eyed vessel of purity that was Princess Di). If anything, such efforts probably only made the magazine's dwindling general readership embarrassed on her behalf, sort of like when your mom gets a little inebriated and tries to flirt and dance the way the kids do. On the other hand, something had to shake the thing out of its rapidly advancing dotage, and the early evidence suggests the Remnick years are not proving to be any heroic palliative, what with the uninterrupted reign of Gopnik, the oddly inert reviews, the profiles of F. A. Hayek and Jerry Lewis. My general advice, though, is to resist the urge to fetishize any culture organ as a bearer of literary last words, on the simple grounds that it is the very thing that every such magazine most wants you to do. And as the sobering example of La Renata attests, all the toy-soldier intrigue that comes hard upon such a designation is often the quickest path to surrendering your own judgment in such matters, to say nothing of your sanity. And speaking of which, my recommendations regarding balance to the destructive, wonderful wit of Suck are simple: Turn off the computer, exit your apartment, lie down in sun-dappled meadow, and think of all the things in this life you should be grateful for. Then call up Tina Brown and score some crack. And one last thing: That's Mr. Martins to you. Holly Martins Did Adler suspect that the Liddy children had, at one point, been clones? That all children begin life as replicants? Or, for that matter, that I, perhaps, might be one? Adler is merely saying that the kids are individuals, as opposed to most cookie-cutter, whiny, loser towheads you see in the world. She's not talking about genetics but rather personality. This kind of drunken gunfighting isn't what I've come to expect from Suck. Shape up. Elijah Meeks <ElijahM@ AdicomWireless.com> I applaud your fire-breathing empiricism. This, however, falls under the category of a new accessory we've added at Suck, the writing device known as the "joke." One of the situations in which you might expect to see the joke applied is when a maladroit use of an image or metaphor is literalized, and its interpretation is heightened to an absurd degree for comic effect. In this instance, the random deployment of an inapposite genetic metaphor to restate a point already made in the first place — that the kids are indeed individuals — sends the mind reeling for the simple reason that the hapless reader of Gone never knows what Adler is going to say next or why she might be saying it. So to review: The literal reading of "clones" is no less preposterous than many of the other fussy and loony byways one stumbles into over the course of Gone. And the fact that it concerns convicted Watergate creep Gordon Liddy adds an undertone of witty espionage to the execution of the joke. It does occur to me, however, that perhaps some other genetic experiment gone terribly awry has resulted in the terrifying specter you describe: A vast cohort of children loose in the world, with toes in the place where their heads should be. If this means what I think it might, we're going to need all the drunken gunfighting we can muster. Holly Martins While I certainly cannot find fault in Martins' criticism of Renata Adler, I think the whole piece is simply rendered inert by that ridiculous last line. Yes, it is very amusing to dissect the now vestigial culture that The New Yorker was once the voice for. However, it is just bad writing to clumsily attempt to invalidate the whole publication because there were too few ideas banging around in the attic on how to end a piece. Since the American literary culture (or is that semi-literate) has long since rotted away and The New Yorker has been so shitty and irrelevant for so long, I am sure that it is hard to see how The New Yorker could have once had a place in anything intellectually interesting. But, sadly, it did. Let us give all those decrepit, senile, Park Avenue invalids that at least. G <unhot@hotmail.com> If you'll look over the offending final sentence closely, you'll notice that the "it" you have associated with the magazine at large actually refers to the social contract inhering in Adler's brain, the tight association of culture and clubbiness. I would never say that The New Yorker of old had no reason for being — and I am straining mightily not to insert the obvious punchline here regarding a key symptom of the culture's swoon into semi-literacy being the inability to assign pronouns to their proper antecedents. Holly Martins oops, my mistake. excuse portion of the show: a) i get up at 4 a.m. here in SF because of the market and respond to emails and webzine articles when half asleep b) there's not a good latte to be found near the transamerica building c) i'm an idiot in general d) all of the above i hope i do not turn into one of those people who writes the president asking to stop the CIA from controlling the weather. G <unhot@hotmail.com> |
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