By David Rutter
On March 28, the Sun-Times published an excerpt of columnist Richard Roeper’s then-forthcoming book, Bet The House: How I Gambled Over a Grand a Day for 30 Days on Sports, Poker, and Games of Chance.
“I’ve been on a professional lucky streak for nearly my entire career – something I try to remember always,” Roeper wrote. “Sometimes I get irritated when people say, ‘Must be nice to watch movies for a living.” [I want] to sit down with these people and tell them about all the hours I put in doing behind-the-scenes work. I want to invite them to watch crappy movie after crappy movie in a dark screening room in the middle of the day. I’d like to explain to them the challenge isn’t writing A column, it’s writing a column every day, four or five times a week, for 20 years. I’d like to make them understand that between the column and the blog and the Twittering and the Facebooking, the book projects and the TV show I’m trying to put together, the meetings and the screenings and the appearances and the speeches and the guest shots on radio and TV, it feels like I’m never not working.
“And then I realize I should shut the f*ck up.”
When a columnist and his accomplice newspaper write this sort of self-referential claptrap, two things are immediately obvious from the reader-columnist transaction.
First, under no circumstances in this space time continuum is this writer ever going to “shut the f*ck up” or even “shut the fuck up.” Because that might require some period of quiet self-reflection and introspection which we all know is a waste.
Second, we owe a deep debt of gratitude to the Sun-Times for saving us from that awful word with the cleverly prophylactic “f*ck”, a collection of letters than essentially cannot be pronounced in any other way than “fuck.”
Let’s all have a group wink-wink, say-no-more moment of self-recognition here.
As a writer, Roeper is a cheap date who occasionally delivers, and I sincerely hope that cheap dates don’t take offense at being lumped in with Roeper. The thinking-to-drivel ratio on his Sun-Times work is about one in 10, which might be a function of being stretched too thin in The Roeper Media Empire. Thinking takes time. Glibness is not a counterweight to insight.
Posted on May 21, 2010