October

Draplin declares October to be his favorite month. I’m inclined to agree.

Scott McLemme on BHL

Over at Inside Higher Ed, Scott McLemme — without so much as a hint of jealousy — ponders why Bernard-Henri Lévy has become a fixture of not just the French, but the U.S. media. (See, for instance, BHL’s regular appearances on Charlie Rose’s show, or the glowing profiles The New York Times runs of him every so often.)

Ultimately, McLemme (who is easily one of my favorite critics) comes to surprising, Camille Paglia-esque conclusion about the guy:

Clearly it is time to reinvest in America’s fast-thinking infrastructure. Dependence on foreign sources of ideological methane is just too risky. Besides, as a couple of my far-flung correspondents have recently pointed out, the recent embrace of BHL by the American media is raising questions about just how gullible we really are.

9.14.2008 New York Times Digest

1. “A Western State of Mind”

“Governor Palin comes from a place in the West that embodies deep-seated ideas and myths and contradictions about the role of the frontier in the American psyche. In some sense, Ms. Palin has become a metaphor for Alaska itself, and as grand a landscape as Alaska is, the current discussion is less about a geographical location than about a state of mind, or states of mind.”

2. “Bering Straight Talk”

“The really scary part of the Palin interview was how much she seemed like W. in 2000, and not just the way she pronounced nu-cue-lar. She had the same flimsy but tenacious adeptness at saying nothing, the same generalities and platitudes, the same restrained resentment at being pressed to be specific, as though specific is the province of silly eggheads, not people who clear brush at the ranch or shoot moose on the tundra.”

3. “Making America Stupid”

“Why would Republicans, the party of business, want to focus our country on breathing life into a 19th-century technology — fossil fuels — rather than giving birth to a 21st-century technology — renewable energy? As I have argued before, it reminds me of someone who, on the eve of the I.T. revolution — on the eve of PCs and the Internet — is pounding the table for America to make more I.B.M. typewriters and carbon paper. ‘Typewriters, baby, typewriters.’”

4. “Ate a Whole Pint? Check Again”

“Aiming to offset increased ingredient and transportation costs, some of the nation’s food manufacturers are reducing the size of packages. The price, of course, usually stays the same.”

5. “David Lean, Perfectionist of Madness”

“Maybe the signature shot of Lean’s career is the long, long take of Sherif Ali (Omar Sharif) approaching across the sands in Lawrence of Arabia (1962), an indistinct, heat-shimmery figure gradually coming into focus in the blinding desert sun. That spectacular shot is, in a way, this filmmaker’s career in miniature, progressing slowly, waveringly, from very small to very large, and demanding our attention at every stage.”

6. “Flying the Unfriendly Skies”

“Back in 1967, the best-selling book Coffee, Tea or Me? (subtitled The Uninhibited Memoirs of Two Airline Stewardesses) portrayed life in the air as a nonstop party, one to which the authors felt privileged to be invited. Another 60s artifact, the play Boeing, Boeing, recently revived on Broadway in a Tony Award-winning production, also pictured the life of stewardesses (as they were called then) as a glamorous romp, with suitors in every port. Most recently, the fictional ad executives on Mad Men were thrilled when they were asked to compete for an airline account, not only because of the business it would bring in but also because they would be in on the casting sessions for the stewardesses and would get to fly free. Oh, such fun!”

7. “Summa Cum Madden”

“Madden’s true legacy is as one of the sporting world’s premier public intellectuals. Madden is a teacher, and the NBC gamecast and the Madden NFL video game are his classrooms.”

Woody Allen: Social Climber

Lennard Davis makes a good point about Woody Allen, one I hadn’t really thought of before: 

His admiration of the lifestyles of the rich and famous turned his writerly and critical gaze away from social questions. Rather than an engaged social critic, he became a disengaged social climber, and in so doing, he ruled out the possibility that his films would be like those of Vittorio De Sica or other neorealists such as Ermanno Olmi who incorporate a class analysis in their work.

The whole piece is worth reading.

Read, Write, Sleep, and Don’t Watch TV

To the consternation of many other fiction writers, you are incredibly prolific. You also don’t watch television. Are the two connected? Is there anything on television you are curious to see? I am a bit of a crank, I admit. Until I went off to college at 17, I was part of a household in which the TV was on all the time. In college, I discovered that there was more to life than TV. And so I refuse to watch any prime-time programming. Yes, yes, I know I’ve missed great things, but let me be a crank. I do watch PBS once in a while, I love the old movie channel, and I do watch the Dodgers and Angles usually sans sound, with music and a book.

What is your daily reading diet? I start with two newspapers: the L.A. Times and the Santa Barbara News Press. Then I re-read what I’ve written the previous day. Then I work. When that’s over, I do something physical: yard work, hiking, swimming, snorkeling. Then I make dinner, read, maybe watch a movie, sleep. This last is important: I need my rest, as we all do; and I sleep well, you’ll be happy to know, as a result of having a clean conscience.

—T.C. Boyle, in an interview with Allison Engel, USC Trojan Family Magazine, Winter 2006

Related Reading: “More on Hitchens’s Apartment.”

God and Jerk at Yale

Rachel Toor responds to that William Deresiewicz article I blogged about last month:

At elite universities, students from vastly different backgrounds are thrown together. On the surface, it looks like the world is their pearl-studded oyster. In reality, the experience can be bruising. Those of us who are taught to value critical thinking can get schooled out of a capacity for empathy. In conversations with academics, I am often struck by how little generosity of spirit informs the critique of their students.

and

It’s a chestnut of academe that students get in the way of the faculty’s “real” work, and an even more tired move to complain about the questionable work ethic and values of students. Deresiewicz’s essay, beautifully written and critically smart, flattens the variety of his students’ lives into the kinds of generalizations we try to nudge first-year composition students out of making.

Someone should put these two on a panel together.