By Steve Rhodes
Let’s catch up.
Women’s Work
“The New York Times Book Review has never exactly embraced passionate advocacy – unless it was promoting Pynchon’s and DeLillo’s place in the postmodernist canon. Even worse, it has become the place where serious feminist books come to die – or more accurately, to be dismissed with the flick of a well-manicured postfeminist wrist,” writes Sarah Seltzer in Bitch. (h/t: Literago).
“Recently, Times editors – in both the daily paper and the Sunday section – have trotted out a particularly insidious formula for bashing feminist authors. First, hire a female reviewer to unleash misogynist tropes in her piece and then, lest she appear prejudiced against her own gender, throw in an illogical, contradictory statement about the importance of a less threatening version of feminism that isn’t so ‘polarizing,’ ‘provocative,’ or ‘strident’.”
Chinese Democracy
“Philip Roth once contrasted, slightly enviously, the American writer, who can say anything he wishes but is usually ignored, with his Eastern Bloc counterpart, who, since nothing is permitted to him, receives respectful attention for everything he writes,” Pankaj Mishra recalls in “Tiananmen’s Wake,” a review of Ma Jian’s Beijing Coma.
“Born in 1953, Ma Jian is one of the Chinese artists and intellectuals who came of age in the last years of the Cultural Revolution. Exempt from personal participation in the worst excesses of Maoism, this generation, which includes China’s best-known filmmakers, Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou, as well as the artist Ai Weiwei, was the first to dare embrace the possibilities of artistic maneuver in China’s unruly transition from the ‘struggle session’ to the free market. As the Communist Party, adopting a market economy, shed some of its ideological orthodoxy, anything seemed possible – at least, until the next crackdown.
“Ma Jian seems to have hovered on the raffish end of the new countercultural spectrum – what the Sinologist John Minford termed the ‘culture of the liumang (an untranslatable term loosely meaning loafer, hoodlum, hobo, bum, punk).’ Divorced from his first wife and abandoned by his girlfriend, Ma Jian feigned illness at work and hung out with other misfits, drinking beer and discussing Waiting for Godot. Accused of ‘spiritual pollution’ by the authorities, he left Beijing in late 1983 and, travelling with a camera, a notebook, and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, wandered around China for three years, subsisting on odd jobs and the kindness of friends and strangers. The commissars caught up with him in 1987, when, having just moved to Hong Kong, he published a story based on his travels in Tibet. The story, describing the degradation of China’s most religious minority, apparently spurned socialist realism’s demand for cheerful uplift, and it earned Ma Jian a blanket ban on publication in China.”
Um, wow. What more do you need to know?
Health & Welfare
“There are so few good belly laughs in health care these days. What a pity I am likely to be the only person on the planet to enjoy the guffaw-laden, if slightly unnerving, experience of reading Dr. Nancy Snyderman and Dr. Nortin Hadler’s new books in tandem, taking careful notes,” Abigail Zuger wrote recently in the Times.
“With chirpy, can-do optimism [Dr. Snyderman] recapitulates the standard wisdom. Watch your diet, exercise, lose weight, stop smoking, be screened regularly for a variety of dire illnesses, rein in cholesterol and blood sugar, stay in touch with your doctor and be sure to check out those aches and pains pronto, just in case. So speaks the medical establishment.
“Dr. Hadler, a rheumatologist and professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina who is a longtime debunker of much the establishment holds dear. Dr. Hadler may not actually keep a skull on his desk, but he might as well. We are all going to die, he reminds us. Holding every dire illness at bay forever is simply not an option. The real goal is to reach a venerable age — say 85 — more or less intact. And the statistics tell Dr. Hadler that ignoring most of the advice Dr. Snyderman offers is the way to do it.”
Franklin Delano Clinton
I’m not condoning adultery, but I find it fascinating how the press treats Bill Clinton’s alleged improprieties compared to those of FDR and JFK. For example:
“An offhand comment by Eleanor Roosevelt to her mother-in-law in 1920 – ” ‘Did you know Lucy Mercer married Mr. Winty Rutherfurd two days ago?’ ” – masked what was probably the most painful emotional trauma of her life: the discovery of a wartime affair between her husband, Franklin, then assistant secretary of the Navy in the Wilson administration, and her social secretary, the well-bred and charming Lucy Mercer,” Susan Ware wrote last month in a Tribune book review.
“Eleanor offered Franklin a divorce, but he chose to stay married, in large part because of his political ambitions; elected office would have been out of the question for a divorced man. In addition, his domineering mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, threatened to cut off his inheritance if he left Eleanor and his five children for Lucy. In this tense family drama, FDR agreed never to see Lucy again, a promise we now know he failed to keep. The Lucy Mercer story and its aftershocks continued to play out in complicated ways for the rest of the Roosevelts’ marriage, culminating with Eleanor learning that Lucy had often visited the White House in her absence during the war and was with FDR the day he died at Warm Springs, Ga., in 1945.
“The story of FDR and Lucy has been known for decades.”
John F. Clinton
Meanwhile, Ted Sorenson has been flogging a new book while given a free pass on burnishing the myth of Camelot, not the reality.
“He acknowledges Kennedy’s promiscuities,” Jack Rosenthal wrote placidly in a recent New York Times review. “‘At this stage, it does not honor J.F.K. for me to attempt to cover up the truth . . . Sometimes blind loyalty is trumped by overriding principles of truth and decency.'”
At this stage? As opposed to this stage? Or when it was happening?
“He says elliptically that ‘high jinks in the White House swimming pool, long alleged, were perhaps inappropriate but not illegal.’ In any case, ‘I know of no occasion where his private life interfered with the fulfillment of his public duties.'”
Sorenson once dismissed tales of high jinks (a charitable description, given Seymour Hersh’s reporting) in the White House swimming pool; Hersh also showed that JFK’s private life indeed interfered with his public duties. Let’s not live in the land of myth anymore.
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Posted on July 8, 2008