[Note: Movable Snipe is a week-long feature wherein two writers read and evaluate five blogs, sending each other one letter a day. This week's Snipers are Michael Helke and Fiona Maazel. Michael's first letter can be accessed here; Fiona's response to it, here. Day Two: Michael; Fiona. Day Three: Fiona.]
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…