Movable Snipe: Ellen’s Duds, Kingsley and the Women, Waugh and the Jews

Here's my question about Wolcott: why does any print journalist or writer need a blog? Doesn't Wolcott get enough space to air his sometimes interesting, sometimes merely snappish thoughts and mini-thoughts in Vanity Fair? He can be funny but he's rarely unpredictable–sort of like Frank Rich with fangs. And didn't his one and only novel (who am I to talk, having fallen into a Henry Rothian silence after the publication of my one and only novel over two decades ago) feature something about a cat, either on the cover or in the plot? I hate and fear cats and never entirely trust people who like them.

I do entirely concur with his points about Ellen DeGeneres being astonishingly bland in her hosting role at the Oscars; she even repeated one un-funny joke, as both my daughter and I noticed. That all said, I'm completely uninterested in hearing about or reading about Ann Coulter at this point; she seems like a parody of herself, and clearly would never have captured the limelight (what is the blogosphere form of limelight?) if not for those incredible legs and that endless blonde hair.

She makes conservatives look like blowhards, the lot of them, which plays nicely into the unreflexive views of the Left. And yes, it was nice to read the bouquet he tossed to Clive James, although I found James' defense of Kingsley Amis in the TLS on the occasion of the Zachary Leader biography beyond bizarre. Instead of analyzing his somewhat thwarted promise as a writer and his paralyzing phobias, James defends Amis' bedroom habits, of all things, insisting that Amis wasn't a compulsive womanizer so much as an appreciator of the infinite variety of womankind. And that every female he ever bedded not only knew that he saw them in all their uniqueness but forgave him because of it.

I don't buy it. But I do think James' piece on The Sopranos is one of the best High/Low essays I've ever read.

Hit & Run seems like a well-intentioned and thoughtful site, but a little on the earnest side. Of course earnestness is infinitely preferable to hipness or archness or knowingness Neal Gabler wrote a perceptive piece in the LA Times not long ago on "Hollywood in Decline" in which he referred to "an ever-growing culture of knowingness, especially among young people, in which being regarded as part of an informational elite — an elite that knew which celebrities were dating each other, which had had plastic surgery, who was in rehab, etc. — was more gratifying than the conventional pleasures of moviegoing."

The "print archives" features articles that remind me of old-fashioned articles, the kind I used to read inside the covers of a magazine at night in bed. In that sense, it's refreshingly retrograde and I liked two pieces I read, one on "Enforcing Virtue" by Cathy Young, which was fairly nuanced in its analysis of what she calls "the tension between liberty and morality." Not revelatory but not plagued by the typically intransigent Left/Right ideological agendas, either.

The piece that really interested me but proved a bit wispy was called “iWorld". I must admit that I have been obsessed with getting an iPod and learning how to download music on to it for the last two years. I was given one as a gift and I think I bought the second one, but one went missing and the other was appropriated by my daughter. Two days ago I decided to attempt to get control of the situation once again by ordering a new iPod, which has yet to arrive, although the iPod skins have arrived ahead of the gizmo itself. Now I have to learn how to use the damn thing, which my daughter has terrorized me into believing is beyond my limited technological grasp. This is no country for older people, the young in one another’s arms, communing with their white earbuds, the birds in their trees…

Don't have much of an opinion about Kesher Talk, at least yet, except that I'm tired of Jewish puns—if that's what they are—being used for the names of magazines, blogs (like this one), etc. It seemed to fall between the stools of the particular (as in tribal) and the general (as in the larger political scene). I never followed the Wilson-Plame affair with quite the scandalized ardor so many others seem to have felt as they watched it unfold. I mean, I'm glad justice was served and Cheney seems ever more like a malign version of the Wizard of Oz, but—and I hope I don't sound too blaise when I say this—it seems like another example of corruption in the corridors of power rather than the paradigmatic, Ur instance. It’s one of those incidents that people who don't generally get exercised about political malfeasance mostly because they don't follow politics with any but glancing attention batten on to. But even as I write this, I see the righteous Bush-bashing elite-gathering to air their views on NPR or the Sunday morning chat shows, none of which I tune in to.

Speaking of names of things, from whence comes Design Observer? I was expecting comments on the latest designs, sort of like a blog version of Wallpaper, and instead I got come cultural comments— on Evelyn Waugh and The King of Scotland—that have only the thinnest link to issues of aesthetics. I thought the movie was very strong and Forest Whittaker is a great talent but didn't I read somewhere that Idi Amin’s son complained that the actor didn't bear any resemblance—physical or psychological—to his father?

As for Waugh, he’s infinitely compelling in the way that people with astringent but vulnerable sensibilities always are. But then, I am always brought up short by the knowledge that he wouldn't have warmed to either me, as a Daughter of Zion, or God knows, this blog. This is evidence of either serendipity or synergy (remember how excited people once were by the prospect of synergy?) or simply old-fashioned coincidence, but just tonight, while reading a piece about the late and memorable Caroline Blackwood—who played muse to and married several gifted men (including Lucien Freud and Robert Lowell) before going off and writing her own chilly novels and acid-dipped journalism (she and I were quite friendly for a period, but she was possessed of a quite breathtaking destructive streak that suggested her heart had been permanently broken early on and never quite cohered again)—I happened
upon this comment in a letter Waugh wrote to Nancy Mitford upon hearing that Blackwood had married Lucien Freud: "You know that poor Maureen's daughter made a runaway match with a terrible Yid?"

I've heard a lot about Matt Yglesias and I know Matt’s father, Rafe, so I'll be diplomatic and say that from my brief perusal thus far I wasn't bowled over. I didn't think the level of dialogue about Giuliani was particularly insightful. He is authoritarian; he did make the city safer, at least for the upper-middle-classes; I don’t recall Dinkins as having been particularly active on any front; and I can't claim to know enough about the architectural logistics of the city's emergency response center or the World Trade Center to know whether he should have put the center in WTC 1 or 2 instead of 7. Do these bloggers have blueprints of the buildings in front of them?

Can we talk about Lolita and your National Review essay tomorrow, even if none of these blogs mention the book?

Daphne