Author: Hans Eisenbeis

It has come to our attention that someone around town is stickering our noble little magazine racks. First, there was a sticker with the strange invocation to “Fight Commonism.” Now, either the same party, or someone else, has decided to emend that bold statement with “Republicans Suck” in a few true, blue locations.

After a great deal of street-walking, note-taking, and question-asking, we now know who was responsible for the first round of stickering.

It was us. As it turns out, our good friends at AB advertising helped us develop this little campaign, which at one point grew ambitious enough to make the leap to cable TV. In that ad, we poked a little fun directly at our friendly colleagues in high places, who had suffered the embarrassment of getting caught, uh, sycophanting the same person at the same time.

We have had some small reservations about the opportunity for misunderstanding this whole “commonism” thing, particularly on the radio ads. In the mouths of less-experienced or more-harried broadcasters, it has been audibly mispronounced as “communism.” While the invitation to “fight communism” is rakish in a pleasant sort of way—who doesn’t like to be put in the game when the score is out of reach?—it is not a precise representation of our politics around here. (We leave it to you to decide what those are. The one thing you can count is that we love a good argument, and by the time we’re done, we don’t remember what our opinion was in the first place. If there was a party called “Devil’s Advocate,” we’d join up faster than you could say, “Paul Magers is actually kinda complex, I could read a thousand magazine articles about him, and die wanting more.”)

So but! What is with these “Republicans Suck” stickers? We are not happy about them. The vandals can’t possibly believe we here at The Rake are so unseemly in our affiliations as to have a declared party. The possibilities boggle the beleagured mind. Do they know that we stickered the “Commonism” bits, but they misread it as “communism,” and assume we are old-school, red-baiting McCarthy-ites? That would be a middling kind of ignorance—smart enough to recognize the irony of us stickering our own racks, but not smart enough to spell correctly, nor to read the magazine very closely. Are they rushing to our defense, thinking we are under attack by old-school, red-baiting GOPers? That would be a sort of charming naivete, compounded by the spelling and reading problem. Are they just silly kids looking for a safe place to put a provocative sticker? That would be the most-likely, least time-wasting conclusion a busy editor could make.

In today’s New York Observer, our old friend Philip Weiss indulges us in one of our favorite subjects—the history of the New Yorker. Weiss, you may know, began his decorated career in journalism here in the Twin Cities and some of his most memorable stories have been set in the area. (His profile in Harper’s of Stephen Blumberg, the Twin Cities native who took bibliophila to felonious new heights, is a classic.)

Anyway, Weiss reiterates the story of New Yorker writer Jack Kahn, who was one of the magazine’s most prolific authors, and helped establish its national reputation by writing from the ranks of the U.S. Army during World War II. We’ve mentioned before one of the mechanical reasons the New Yorker supersized its national reputation (and circulation) after the war—they’d cultivated a massive readership in the military itself with free Pony editions. When GIs got home from the war, they became subscribers en masse, wherever they lived.

Weiss makes a good case based on aesthetics as well. Before World War II, the magazine was fizzy. It still considered itself primarily a humor magazine set in the Jazz age. War changed the tenor of the times, and would either kill the the magazine or require it to evolve. It was always a good magazine, but a world war was the kind of journalistic material that created an opportunity to make a lasting contribution to American letters. Harold Ross and his staff rose to the occasion, and their achievement has now persisted for three-quarters of a century. (The title of Weiss’s article, “The New Yorker at War,” is also the title of an old anthology of the magazine’s best pieces from World War II. Highly recommended.)

It makes us sad to consider how times have changed. We hate to be defeatist, but it seems like no amount of courage today is enough to do meaningful work in the field of journalism, particularly as it pertains to Iraq. Print as a medium has certainly declined in substance and style, but more crucially, the entire culture is inured to journalism. Reporters and writers are held in low esteem—generally considered either rubes to be manipulated by PR flacks, or partisan snipers to be avoided at any cost. In both cases, the free movement of both mind and body are gone, for the journalist. The borders are closed; we simply do not get the access or the respect that reporters got in the middle of the last century.

To get directly to the point: Why aren’t there any memorable stories coming out of Iraq—the most important story of the new century? It is because good, thoughtful, independent writers are not getting in or out, and the military has a waterproof monopoly on virtually all meaningful information there. If it does not support the campaign, it is not allowed. Please refer to your wallet-card instructions for dealing with the press.

More subtly, the main difference between then and now is this: Today’s volunteer army is far more class-segregated than the drafted armies of the second world war. The New Yorker had a number of established young writers who were subsequently drafted and went to war. Almost to a man, these young fellows wished to continue to write for the New Yorker. Today, nothing is more rare than a trained writer in the ranks. Even if we could find him, he would have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting clearance to write for an independent, objective, for-profit magazine. If the military has learned anything in the past fifty years, it’s how to use information as yet another weapon in the arsenal. Never has the phrase “loose lips sink ships” been more threatening to the simple enterprise of telling a truthful and engaging story about the most important, brutally dangerous moment in our lifetimes.

Yesterday, USA Today reported that Rolling Stone magazine has turned down an ad from a Bible publisher. A company called Zondervan, apparently the largest publisher of Bibles in the nation, wanted to buy a full-spread advertisement to reach out to “spiritually intrigued 18 to 34 years olds.” This is a demographic that is supposedly buying religious and spiritual books as if their life depended on it—except for the Holy Bible. Citing some obscure policy against religious advertising, Jann Wenner’s godless people decided to pass. We can see the inter-office memo now:

“We regret to inform you that our spiritual director, Satan, sees a conflict of interest in advertising your book with us. This would be a little like NBC agreeing to ads for ABC. We’re sure you can understand that. We were crazy to consider this in the first place, although we are not in the habit of turning down money from anyone. That smacks dangerously of morality, and how far in the world we get with morality? Not very far, indeed!”

We’ve joked about all the strange human behavior we’re seeing that might be signalling the end-times—but actually, it all comes down to that hoary boogeyman, the “emboldened religious right.” There is something both reassuring and disturbing about Rolling Stone’s seemingly random enforcement of what they admit is an “unwritten policy.” On the one hand, it feels like tit-for-tat: You cannot simultaneously condemn the godless youth culture and its secular overlords, and co-opt them in your ad campaigns. On the other hand, why is the “embattled left” so uncomformtable with traditional religion?

Christians, for their part, should take a good long look in the mirror and realize that their sur-name is not as blameless as they might like it to be. The extended family, from radical protestants to insane evangelicals, has made the whole country jumpy. Regular people who prefer to take their spirituality with a heavy chaser of secular realism, want no part of “organized religion” because it harbors too many hippocritical, hateful people. Soon it will be neceessary to clarify just what kind of Christian you are—just as we now expect practicing Muslims to disavow fundamentalism.

Up until now, it’s been a sort of one-sided story of conservative Christians strong-arming their views onto a nervous public, with the complicity of conservative media owners. It was a mere six weeks ago that two television network refused to run ads for the United Church of Christ which made it clear that this progressive denomination was, unlike the louder sects of the self-righteous, open to gays and lesbians and minorities. Last year, the International Bible Society successfully inserted the Gospel of Luke into the Houston Chronicle. And just a few weeks ago, the Colorado Springs Gazette accepted the entire New Testament as an insert.

The Bible is the world’s best-selling book ever, and it is copyright free. It is free money to anyone who wants to publish it. Of course, the marketplace has been flooded, and there is some question as to whether supply has not exceeded demand . Still, there is something tawdry about advertising the Holy Bible—a method of indirect evangelizing that falls somewhere between street-pamphleteering and the siren-call of the personal injury lawyers. There used to be gentleman’s agreements that certain aspects of our lives were to be held above the shimmy-shake of the ad-man’s solicitations. But of course, those times are long gone. Where would Jesus advertise?

It is gratifying that people seem to be getting unfortable with pushy religious sorts. Our nation was founded on religious freedom, but more important than that, it was founded on religious dissent. A magazine that is nothing without dissent—or at least the marketable perception of dissent, the cornerstone of rock ‘n’ roll—probably cannot afford to be associated in the minds of its readers with the opposite of dissent, which is blind faith.

But a thoughtful person admits there is something unsettling about Rolling Stone’s decision. Any publisher can refuse advertising for any reason (although they may not be able to avoid law suits when they do), but their actions suggest that they think there is something wrong with reading the most important text of Western Civilization. If more people read the Bible for themselves, free from the insane interpretations of greasy-haired bullies in pulpits, on soapboxes, and on cable TV, the scales might fall from their eyes, and they might see how the good name of Christianity (and, by the way, Judaism and Islam—people of “The Book,” you know) is being destroyed by the self-righteous forcing it into the secular world, which does not tolerate absolutism very well or for very long.

Still, we’re troubled. We wonder if this whole dust-up somehow invalidates that ordination we received years ago through one of Rolling Stone’s classified ads.

Last Friday, we had what must have been the biggest, most mirthful Rakish party yet. Sad to say, the Big Boss was dreadfully sick, which is a shame, because no one hosts a party like the Big Boss. Still, just about anyone and everyone who is responsible for putting together The Rake was there, in fine form. High point of the evening was a game of doubles on the billiards table. Shooters were quizzed on a capricious list of great titles from literature. It was not required to know who wrote, for example, The Stranger, in order to take your shot. An incorrect or incomplete answer was just as acceptable as a correct one, and anyone in the gallery could offer an answer. It was rather like cognitive bumper-pool—brainteasers as distractions and obstacles. For some reason, we were stuck on science fiction authors and existentialist authors—perhaps because we thought these would be easiest. Perhaps because the mental horizons had been considerably contracted by a lot of really, really good wine. Anyway, we managed to stump Hugh Bennewitz with a reversal. What was Alexis de Tocvqueville’s most famous book? Bennewitz demurred, and we answered— incorrectly, or at least incompletely, “America.” In all fairness, this should go down in the minutes as a demerit to the question-asker. The title of De Toqueville’s most famous work is, of course, “Democracy in America.” We are sorry. But we know what we meant.

It is often the spirit of the thing that counts. This morning, we read James Woolcott’s takedown of the insufferable Charles Krauthammer, and we couldn’t agree more. A well-established truism: One of the underpinnings of the red wave has been the echo chamber of right-wing bloggers, radio, and TV, who simply will not let go of certain arguments and certain incidents, no matter how specious or wrong they are. It’s like Chinese water torture with these people.

We find it especially interesting that in all the kerfuffle about “Rathergate” (egad, we thought the -gate suffix had finally been staked through the heart, along with -stock, but we live in regressive times— hello, again, Gilded Age! Goodbye, New Deal!), no one has ever argued the facts, only the documentation. This is a happy situation for the right, which has strangely become the party of moral relativism. These days, no one argues more loudly than a conservative that the message is indistinguishable from the messenger, that it is impossible to have a truly objective journalism, and therefore we must wallow in a constant jet-stream of gas and bile.

Anyway, the whole point of “Rathergate” has, from the right’s point of view, become a smoking gun on the liberal bias of the media. Of course, no amount of painful soul-searching, and no mea culpa at any volume will satisfy these people. Because once we move beyond that perfect storm of speculation and conspiracy theory, we are left with what we are always left with—the plain old boring facts. Why is it more improtant that Dan Rather got duped by forgeries than that our president went AWOL? Why did the Swift Boat vets continue to have an impact on the national consciousness after their claims had been eviscerated by serious journalists? Why have the stories that independently confirmed the essential claims and spirit of the news report that became Rathergate been pushed aside? Why does no one care when the present administration actually pays a reporter to produce news that is favorable to his benefactor? Why have we been acting as if Vietnam never happened? Because this is what the right-leaning media does best—strike up the band, especially the trombone section, whenever there is partisan skirmish to be won, and especially when there are inconvenient facts to be obscured. Which is at all times and in all places.

We should be worried about our extremities today, rather than our extremists. Last night, we repaired down the block to meet up with one of our favorite blogging professionals for a beer, and nearly lost a few toes in the process. We also lost the desire to proceed any further with the editorial “we” until the weather improves. At fifteen below, it’s each man for himself.

I tend to cross the street when I see a discussion of “bloggers versus journalists” coming down the way. Or at least I nestle a little deeper into my parka and avoid eye contact. But I guess I do have a few loose opinions on the matter.

In nervous moments, I worry about the confusion of opinion and reporting in the newspages and on the airwaves. There is virtually no distinction anymore between news and news analysis, and this can be troubling. As Tom Tomorrow so eloquently parses this week, the right has been especially effective at a certain kind of slight-of-hand that swaps facts for opinion. You simply offer a disputed opinion as an accepted fact. This is the legendary “When did you stop beating your wife?” approach to colloquy. Why, we do it ourselves. It’s fun!

Earlier this week, Adam Penenberg wrote that news organizations are cracking down on their employees who blog, taking a dim view of the possible conflicts of interest and the corruption of opinion in news reporting. This is a noble concern, of course—typically, you are not granted official “blogger” status if you must run your posts by an editor or a publisher or a boss of any kind. We have been known to edit our posts here, or run them by lawyers to make sure we’re on the up-and-up, but we consider the daily operation to be part of the larger mechanics of our business. (We don’t officially call this–what you’re reading–a blog for this reason, and one other. To paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, the blogging drawer frequently gets mistaken for the urinal in the offices of Big Media.) Perhaps larger news organizations should consider this approach. But what is most subtle is the basic paradigm at work, separate from the issues of objectivity and conflict of interest and that is that newspapers don’t want their websites to get scooped by their own writers and reporters. In other words, there is still a fundamental prejudice for paper, a “So when did you stop blogging your wife?”paradigm. This is understandable, since there are still no margins whatsoever in online publishing. But this is a sort of self-fulfilling pessimism. If news organizations paid their reporters to post scoops—as well as clearly identified, informed opinion—in the name of their employer’s brand, well, maybe advertisers would become more inclined to take the web seriously. It’s an issue of critical mass, of course. But if editors and publishers got over some of their prejudices, the whole business of journalism would advance a few baby steps.

As I say, this may mean learning to get more comfortable with the Fox approach to journalism which freely deals in news-as-entertainment, and opinion-as-news-as-entertainment. There is a way to accept and embrace this feeling of rudderlessness on a windy sea: Accept more of it, rather than demand less.

Being the broken-record that I am, it eternally recurs to me to reread E.B. White, and it is astonishing how timeless and timely some of his political essays are. Long before Watergate and Vietnam, he worried about the state of democracy, and his basic point was a genteel one: he said democracy is in peril when the unbeliever feels unwelcome here. In other words, it is essential that dissent be not only tolerated but safeguarded. These are not concrete, enactable values (and certainly not the exclusive property of the left) so much as a basic human generosity of spirit to live and let live. “I have yet to see a piece of writing, political or non-political, that doesn’t have a slant,” he wrote. “All writing slants the way a writer leans,and no man is born perpendicular, although many men are born upright.”

In that respect, I sometimes feel like I have lost an essential virtue—faith in my fellows, that they were born upright. Despite what I view as the conspiracy of lies and the lockstep of blind obedience that prop up the current monopoly, there is consolation in knowing that this is generating more heated blogging, more rabid conversation about first principles, not less. That the extreme right has somehow cultivated a sense of humor in its ascendency is annoying—but reassuring. They can recommend eliminating freedom of the press all they like, but until they do it, it’s just grist for the creative anarchy of the web.

Now, when they start actually messing with the Constitution is when we should take to the streets, no matter how cold it might be.

When you develop a fondness for a particular magazine writer, sometimes you begin to realize that you share their interests. Not many writers, of course, get to write about what interests them. In the never-ending battle to put food on the table, writers must deal with very high levels of rejection and frustration. When you are a writer, there are stories you really want to do, but you soon come to the rather defeatist conclusion that no one else on the planet—least of all your editors—see them for the brilliant ideas they are. And so you scrape together story pitches you know they will be interested in, and to varying degrees you feel your soul leeching away.

A sort of upper-ring of purgatory in the writing game is having a job you basically like, where you aren’t required to actually freelance to keep the wolf from the door. Then you get the occasional phone call from someone somewhere who digs your style and wants you to write something for them. You can say yes, you can say no—but you call the shots based on your interest and availability. A very wise person once told us: Never do anything just for the money. That’s all well and good, but freelance writers will starve on advice like that. But perhaps they’ll starve happy.

Anyway, in the midst of this cold snap, we were gratified to read Charles McGrath’s review of “The Boys of Winter,” in the Times Book Review. The last time we saw McGrath’s byline was a very nicely done profile of Tom Wolfe for the Times magazine. Normally, we think it’s silly to try to mimick the style of one’s subject, when one’s subject is an intensely idiosyncratic stylist like Tom Wolfe. But McGrath pulled it off nicely, and he knew precisely when to stop with the—damn! can’t breath! is that the sound of my own heartbeat? or rat-a-tat-tat of Compaq laptop genius, hold fast! (The main reason we got interested in Wolfe’s new book at all, and dedicated practically a whole week to this pulpish timesink before wisely putting it aside, was McGrath’s profile in the magazine, and Jacob Weisberg’s critique in the Book Review, two of the most memorable magazine pieces in the past six months.)

It’s fun to think that McGrath can turn from a playful profile of a dandy irritant like Wolfe to the 1980 US Olympic Hockey Team, and that’s what he does here. We can’t think of a less timely, less necessary book, but McGrath finds a way to write about hockey that is fresh, fun, and interesting. It makes us realize just how impoverished we are in the world of sports writing. Compare, for example, the print journalism in Great Britain that rumbles along with the English Premier football league. (On our top-ten books of all time: this little-read Hornby volume, his first published book.) It’s not just a matter of recording the goals and the hooligans. It’s a matter of recreating the gutter-level myths of the game, and making a record of the intense emotional ups and downs. It’s about What It All Means, and you just don’t see that very much in American sports writing. (Baseball has, over the years, had many memorable practitioners. But why should those guys have a monopoly on the art? It’s not as if baseball is inherently more interesting or complex than, say, boxing or fencing or soccer.)

In his review of Wayne Coffey’s new book, McGrath makes it clear that where Coffey excels is in artfully describing the game of hockey itself. The best way to do this is to approximate the play-by-play action of a specific game, rather than attempt any sort of grandiose poetry of the sport taken as a whole. And the 1980 upset over the Soviets is not just a legendary moment in sport, politics, and international relations. It is a mythic game looked at strictly as three periods of ice hockey. Of course, it’s necessary to set the stage—and that requires a lot of interesting analysis of the team dynamic (lots of tension between the stoic Minnesotans and the ballbusting New Englanders; an angel-devil rivalry between Wisconsin coach Bob Johnson and Minnesota coach Herb Brooks, and so on). Coffey apparently pulls it off, and so does McGrath…. fine examples of writers who have achieved the rare privelege of being allowed to write anything they please, and keep renewing that privelege with great stories. We wish others could write this well about the cliche-ridden world of professional sports. Failing that, they might for the sake of human decency, stop trying.

We were vaguely amused by Powerline, the delusional right-wing blog based here in the Twin Cities, that won Time magazine’s “Blog of the Year.” Just when we were getting ready to point out precisely how ridiculous these Big Butt and Ass Rocket guys are (or whatever—why are republicans always so obvious about their latent homosexuality?), Nick Coleman stepped in, and we were glad to hold his coat.

And now, we understand—by way of a wonderful item penned by our good-friend-in-law Mike Mosedale—that TCF bank’s blowhard CEO, Bill Cooper, was so irritated to have his friends and employees technically KO’ed by a heavyweight, that TCF will never advertise in the Strib again while he is in charge. No doubt the TCF board of directors is proud of the personal stand Cooper is taking with their money.

Now that it’s safe for a weakling like us to kick sand in the face of the badly beaten bullies, we have a few talking points of our own. First, being named Time magazine’s Blog of the Year is a little like being elected secretary of the student council. Now, we realize how important it is to the male ego to get and cling to this sort of accolade. We, too, have been known to make hay while the sun shines. We’re just saying that if you rely on Time magazine to be the arbiter of a popularity contest where the only audience appears to be the contestants themselves, you probably have bigger problems you should be dealing with.

Second, the Powerline guys claim they do not blog while they are at work. (We do, by the way. We’re professionals, you know.) But a quick scan of their blog indicates that they have posted almost every hour of the day, with no discernible pattern of dead air that would indicate they are actually away working. Granted, banker’s hours have always been the gold standard for six-figure slacking. Still, we find it hard to believe that they run home every hour in order to post their pulse-quickening updates.

And finally, we wish these rabid NASCAR dads would stop suckling at the paps of our blue-state largesse. If they honestly believed half of what they say, they have no business living among us, the benighted, godless, tax-happy, liberal elite who pay most of the federal govenment’s tab.

Boys, put your money and your butts where your mouths are. We hear there are signs of growth over in South Dakota, and that’s just a stone’s throw from Wyoming. There must be a Log Cabin Republicans chapter out there somewhere with two or three vacant stools. You know, Honest Abe was into butts too!

One of the wonderful things about TiVo is that you actually watch less TV. If you eliminate channel surfing from your routine, and you just check the queue of what the machine has recorded for you—based on your explicit instructions to record, say, the beautiful and brilliant and frightening Mary Lahammer every time she tosses those golden locks on TPT—well, then, you watch only what you intend to watch, and you waste less time. You get to watch Mary when it’s convenient for you, and you don’t have to waste your time on commercials (or pledge drives, or Eric Eskola). This gives you more time to read the New York Times, for example.

Then you read Frank Rich, who informs you that the new season of “24” has begun, with two back-to-back nights of double episodes. You check, and discover that your standing orders to TiVo to keep up with “24” whenever and wherever it might air, well, TiVo remembers. So, you have four hours of TV in two days—practically a new personal record! This, of course, is the perfect circuit between high-brow and low-brow: Reading Frank Rich in order to watch Kiefer Sutherland. (This doesn’t hold much water with your wife, by the way.)

We have mixed feelings about the series. It’s emotionally and physically violent, and there are elements of it that are a little like explicit suicide instructions for a depressed nation. (Torture is always justified by noble ends; the most heinous behavior is acceptable because of the urgency of getting the show over in twenty-four hours, through seventeen relentless episodes.) It’s state-of-the-art, cliffhanger TV, and we often find ourselves watching through our fingers.

But there was a very funny moment in the first episode that we wanted to dwell on for just a moment. After the first crisis, there is an emergency debriefing involving a bunch of senior counter-terrorism officers. They are gathered around a conference table. There is a newbie—a funny, fat guy with a lisp—who is clearly just learning the ropes. He is the only one at the table who does not have an open lap-top in front of him. A supervisor scolds him. “Where is your lap-top, Edgar?” He says, “I don’t need it. I’ve memorized everything.” The supervisor scowls, incredulous. “How will you crunch data?” she says. If it weren’t so sad it would be funny, and if it’s not already a cliche, it will be.

For example: Over the holidays, we were comfortably installed at the cabin in northern Wisconsin. We brought the laptop along in case there was an emergency, and in case we were suddenly gripped by an irrational desire to finish some longterm projects gathering virtual dust on the hard drive. We were sitting around the dinner table trying to remember the names of all the James Bond films. We cheated. We plugged in the modem, dialed up AOL, and quickly had all the answers at our fingertips. The conversation continued, and suddenly we were the most informed, interesting, entertaining person in the room.

We realized a long time ago that email and the internet have more or less replaced all of our biological memory banks. In a very short time now, we will not remember our own name or telephone number— it will be on a keychain somewhere. We’re afraid TiVo and Outlook are a lot more reliable than we are.

What were we saying? Begob, where’s my bus? What bus?

In an essay in the Times Book Review yesterday, William Deresiewicz discusses language—English, in particular, and the persistent tension generated by people who are inflexible prigs about “Correct English.” He compares this with “Standard English”—the modern effort to standardize usage to help stabilize the language for the long haul, but allowing for creativity and innovation. His main point is that “the genius of English is an oral one.” Thus, written language that deviates from spoken language is, he says, a sign of something rotten. (Stuffy, disingenuous writing he identifies as a symptom of class anxiety. We’re rather inclined just to call it bad writing.)

We couldn’t help applying his idea to what’s on our pillow at the moment. Melville’s Moby-Dick is dense with antique language, neologisms, solecisms, alternate spellings, and just plain overwritten sections that threaten to send a modern reader to the nearest harbor with a Barnes & Noble and a Starbucks. (Extra credit: How would Ahab have felt about Starbucks? No cheating.)

There are no “problems” in Moby-Dick. There are lots of “problematical and paradoxical predicaments ,” if you follow us. (For example, throughout the novel, Melville uses the construction “ye” as a Quaker affectation meaning “you.” As an article, “ye” is a pseudo-archaic misreading of the word “the.” In old and middle English, “the” was sometimes spelled with the letter thorn, a rune that looks a little like a “y” in handwritten texts, but is still pronounced “th.” Not to confuse the matter too much, but a Quaker would morelikely have said “thee” and “thou” for “you.” A construction like “Ye Olde Candy Shoppe” is just wrong. Oops, now we’re being priggish about it.)

Personally, we think this gassiness gives the book some character. It was written before the standardizers came along, and even if its main point is not to twist the language itself, like, say, James Joyce fifty years later, it certainly feels breezy and free and would, if published today, be considered experimental—not unlike Thomas Pynchon’s last novel.

But we didn’t wish to drag you, dear reader, into an academic discussion about whether language is animal or mineral. We had two small issues with Deresiewicz’s essay. First, the idea that our best novelists have been great by virtue of their ability to write like people speak. He says our “literature is greatest when hueing closest to speech (Chaucer, Wordsworth, Dickens, Joyce). It is no accident that our greatest author was a playwright.” Now there is much to disagree with here, not least of which is that we’re pretty sure people didn’t speak like Dickens wrote—other than in Dickens’ dialogue. And even that conceit is problematic(al). Any writer who has tried to transcribe an interview tape knows that if you wrote exactly the way people speak, it would be unreadable.

More important, we can think of dozens of writers of the finest vintage who don’t write the way people speak. Take two American extremes—Faulkner and Hemingway, the poles of exposition. Faulkner hardly wrote a sentence that can be read in one breath, while Hemingway had the opposite approach, atomizing the language, almost as if one sentence were unaware of the next. Today, Cormac McCarthy is a sort of post-modern incarnation of both. His dialogue is Hemingway, his narrative description is Faulkner, and he is probably the finest living writer of the langage. None of these dudes write the way people speak. (Instead, they write the way people hear, and there is a huge difference.)

And that’s our point, really. The spoken language and the written language are two very different things, with their own assets and liabilities. If that were not the case, poetry would cease to exist, and we’d be working in radio.

Why are editors jerks? We have a lot of theories, but first let’s just say that there are some notable exceptions. Mean editors outnumber nice editors about two to one, in our experience. (Men’s and Women’s magazines: five to one. Literary magazines: one to one.)

Editors tend to believe they are overworked. They also tend to feel underappreciated. Generally, they have a highly developed martyr complex—they are both the ingenuity and the industry of their magazine, though very few people seem to notice. They feel beseiged by writers who are desperate to be published, but who turn out to be unreliable helpmeets. No one ever seems able to execute what the editor has in his mind, but he is too harried or too important to go ahead and do it himself. The result is frequently lots of light and heat and exhaust, and a high rate of turnover on the lower levels of the masthead.

This week, James Truman was put to pasture from Conde Nast. The young, British super-editor had a meteoric rise through the ranks of the world’s greatest magazine company to become its editorial director—a mostly ceremonial, no-receipts expense account, executive position that is the wet-dream of magazine professionals everywhere. (The only perch that is higher and requires even less work: Time’s “editors at large.”)

There is no one we can think of who better fits the stereotype of the editor as frivolous, glacial egotist. Truman became famous for his month-long sabbaticals in the Far East, his month-long sabbaticals in upstate New York, his month-long sabbaticals at Conde Nast Europe. (We exaggerate, slghtly.) He was paid a handsome sum to do not much else besides read magazines and read trends, and try to put the two together in order to help the company make more money. He is most notable, probably, for proposing “Lucky” and “Cargo,” Lucky’s male counterpart. He also got to choose the carpet for Conde Nast’s prestigious new office tower in Times Square. It is not clear whether he ever actually contributed anything to journalism—although he took his leave proposing a never-to-be fine arts magazine, so presumably he still has his pride.

Full disclosure: We have had a lot of wonderful professional colleagues and pen-pals over the years. The exceptions to the rule have been so friendly and forthcoming and supportive that we hesitate to say the following. James Truman was an ass. Not a lot of people were willing to say it, because he was one of the most powerful editors in magazines south of Rockefeller Center.

The problem with a meritocracy like ours is that many people achieve a professional peak (Truman’s was editing Details when Details was so good that it caught the attention and investment of S.I. Newhouse), and then they pretty much coast forever afterward, taking up valuable space. This wouldn’t in itself be a problem, except that these folks tend to be jealous of their expense accounts and private drivers and two-hour martini lunches. They earned this! They stick around long after their expiration dates, and suppress the whole organization, up and down the masthead.

Yes, it is true that Truman once dissed us—privately. Our own fatal flaw is a long memory and an unforgiving nature, along with an occasional, tourettic impulse to sabotage our own advancement. That probably puts us among the mean editors, rather than the nice ones. Sorry about that. We believe we can evolve, and one day use our powers for good.