Hit and Run (Day Three)

Day Three

From: Fiona Maazel To: Michael Helke Subject: The Koran Endorses Bloodshed (And New Yorkers Love To Gab About It)

Hey, Michael. You read the paper today? At Yaddo, there’s always much talk about which house gets the Times and how best to leave it for others once you are done. Me, I read it online. And today I was reading about Iran—Iran is supplying weapons to the insurgency, here is the evidence, here are the serials—let’s start another war. Because that’s what this is, right? Prelude to war? Or maybe I’m just a cynic.

Yes, yes I am. And so is our good man Drezner. His bit on Barbara’s Slavin’s USA Today piece—the Saudis love us and aren’t afraid to say so!—made me laugh.

I mean, I had to read it a couple times because there’s something weirdly incoherent about the man’s prose style, but once I got with it—the ultimate endorsement of pleonasm—I laughed. He’s a cynic. So the Saudis make nice with us, so what? It’s only a gesture. Or: they’re just getting in bed with the winning side. Or: they’re getting in bed with the lesser evil. We’re doing good! We suck. You get the feeling he thinks we suck. And he’s right. Especially now that Bush wants to bleed even more money from the arts, ostensibly to fund his New War. Because when I need money, the first place I turn is the arts. Jeeze. Does anyone read anymore? I’m serious.

Tonight at dinner, someone was telling me the average novel sells 4-6 thousand copies. How grim. Grimmer still is that a lot of these novels are kick-ass. Collections of short fiction, too. Like The Dead Fish Museum by Charlie D’Ambrosio. Such a good book. Featured on Elegant Variation, which is always stumping for books people are not reading but should. It’s depressing. Sarvas has impeccable taste, and just not enough people are caring. Course, I think I liked the site better before he wrote up what you and I are doing. We’re reviewing blogs? I didn’t realize that’s what we were doing, and now I feel like a lowlife for it. I thought we were just talking about stuff of interest.

E.G. Hooray for David Markson! I didn’t know some of his early books were hopping back into print until the EV told me. Need book news? Go to the EV. Need to save your life? Not a bad place to start. I saw Markson recently, in New York, and we talked about whether the Koran actually endorses bloodshed and martyrdom, which I rather think it does, though in the same way the New Testament sees Jesus encourage everyone to kill the Jews. I like how in New York there’s such a concentration of writers and artists, you can actually run into one of them and get talking, spontaneously, about bloodshed. I appreciate the city, but I can’t really deal with these bromides about what is New York and who’s got the right to call a spade, and so on.

I’ve been reading 3 Quarks and I like these guys, but there’s still got to be something else to write about. Fuck you, Adam Gopnik? Should talk of New York, in all its irascible and protean glory, really incite this kind of passion? I sort of prefer ye old Crooked Timber. For one, it’s got eye appeal. I’m all about the serif font and feng shui arrangement of text, and the CT pleases me well. Plus they are writing about things that are a little off the beaten path.

Putin on election monitoring? Most interesting. I have been waiting for him to rewrite the constitution so he can be reelected, but I see that’s not happening. I guess he’s going to take over a large conglomerate someplace, from which he can oversee illegal elections in neighboring countries.

Next post: embodied energy. What the hell is that? I have to go to some other website to read about this thing—energy consumed in creating one unit of product X, wha?—and then back to the CT to read more? I don’t have time for this. Do you have time for this?

Part of what stuns me about the ubiquity of blogging is that people find the time a) to post and b) to read. My life is replete with niggling obligations and tedium—it’s not like I’m saving the world instead of blogging—but still, I have scant room in the day for all this. How do other people manage? My best experience of the Internet continues to be the piffle collected on Nerve’s web trawl. Just a bunch of stupid shit to brighten my day.

I am still looking at the kangaroo man, though he’s old news. He’s been surpassed by eleven gems of culture, like Christina Ricci’s retractable breasts. Wish mine could do that.

From: Michael Helke To: Fiona Maazel Subject: Haggling in the Marketplace of Ideas

Ms. Maazel:

Your outlook regarding the fan mail as evidenced by your response to the anonymous hangman: too right.

Re: real threats to one’s health and reputation: doesn’t Daniel Drezner know that Vladimir Putin can have him killed? Drezner shouldn’t be surprised to wake up one day to see the contents of his stomach glowing through his shirt.

Of course, as Matt Yglesias of Crooked Timber points out, there’s something to be said for living a life of spying and espionage. Saw Munich the other night and thought, “At least I’d have an excuse for sleeping on the floor of my closet.” Was reminded of key scenes from Tony Kushner’s script after reading this essay at 3 Quarks Daily. Particularly when Avner has that intense discussion with the Black Septembrist in the squat. If they only had Alon Levy refereeing for them.

On a related note: read the following letter by Beirut-based Waleed Hazbun when you’ve got a free moment and tell me what you think.

Re “The Good Childhood”: if you survived, period, then it’s good.

Was going to catch the discussion on that very subject at the Central Library in Madison, Wisconsin, at 7 PM (Central) when I realized that 1. I don’t live in Madison, and 2. I’d be missing American Idol anyway.

See? You’re not lacking for company in vacuousness…

Re upbringing: solidly middle class. And don’t think I don’t make a fetish of it in the right circumstances.

Don’t you find yourself wishing that Drezner was your dad? At least he’d give you a ride to school, come rain, sleet or snow, in which the Midwest is wrapped like a frosty gyro.

Re Phillip Rieff: he was Susan Sontag’s husband, wasn’t he? Helped give the world David Rieff, among other contributions. Sontag said she felt she had married herself into a modern-day version of Middlemarch when she fell in with him. Shudder.

Joan Acocella’s 2000 New Yorker essay on Sontag appears in Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints (Pantheon). Ever read her? (Acocella, that is. Would be very surprised to hear that Sontag never appeared on your syllabus.)

Agree with you about layout of Elegant Variation: very user-friendly. And reading the Wednesday bullet points, one is surprised to see Orhan Pamuk, who is in fear of his life from Turkish nationalists, having chosen the States to live in exile. I would have thought Sweden, myself. Or Canada (particularly Toronto). Pamuk hasn’t exactly had the best things to say about the States, but so what: hope he enjoys however much time he chooses to spend here. At least I hope he receives better than Salman Rushdie, whom the government seemed only intermittently concerned with protecting during the years of Khomeini’s fatwa.

Speaking of the consequences of extremist activities, another shudder passes through me: Justin Clark’s story at Nerve about Gordon Lee, a comic book store owner in Rome, Georgia, who’s been harassed for the past three years for the “knowing dissemination” of images of "sexually explicit nudity, sexual conduct, and sadomasochistic abuse" to minors. Source of the flap? The Salon by Nick Bertozzi, a graphic novel murder mystery set in turn-of-the-century Paris, where Picasso is portrayed painting in the nude. A copy unwittingly made it into the hands of a minor. Call out the National Guard: three years later, it’s still being fought over. Bertozzi weighs in with this interesting observation:

“The Disneyfication of culture has helped contribute to that lack of understanding… I think people unfortunately see cartoons and they see a nice thick line — a lot of cartoonists including myself are influenced by that nice thick line. It's assumed to be childlike.”

I think there’s more to it than that, but it’s a nice starting point for a discussion about how the peculiar oppressive forms cultural ignorance can adopt. Care to weigh in?

I must say that I enjoy reading Crooked Timber dispatches such as this one concerning reaction to an interview with Danny Postel, where the reader response fairly overwhelms the article to which readers respond and takes on a life all its own. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote about the “marketplace of ideas,” and it’s a lot of fun to envision the occasional intellectual slugfest erupting in the midst of it. That’s what the ‘Net was made for, I believe.

Now let’s see what jams and jellies you’re offering…

To see the next round of letters, click here.

To see our first installment of Movable Snipe, featuring Spencer Ackerman and Melissa Lafsky, click here.

Fiona Maazel has previously written for Jewcy on why unhappiness is the key to happiness. She also participated in a piety contest with both the U.S. and Iranian presidents in our "Letters to Ahmadinejad" series.

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