Category: Blog Post

In our ongoing coverage of Tom Wolfe’s new book, we mentioned
yesterday that we enjoyed Jacob Weisberg’s review in last Sunday’s New
York Times Book Review. What distinguishes good criticism from great
criticism? We’re glad you asked. A couple of things, actually.

First,
we prefer critics to resist the urge to pronounce a simple verdict.
There are great pressures in the “marketplace” of modern media to give
everything a thumbs up or a thumbs down. That has more or less
guaranteed that most critics are all thumbs. They approach every review
with the idea that they have to make an argument either for or against
it; they begin to marshall their evidence and write their punchlines.
The problem with this approach is that it doesn’t often give the reader
or the subject a fair shake. There are not very many flawless
masterpieces being produced these days—in fact, ever. (That’s kind of
inherent in the definition of “masterpiece.”) There IS a lot of crap,
but you can usually find something redeeming about most of it. The
point is, there is a kind of intellectual dishonesty about reducing
everything to an unqualified yes or no.

Second, there are way
too many critical reviews and they are all way too short. This is
related to the first point—marketplace pressures to cover as many
artifacts and events as possible, and to do it decisively, if not very
thoughtfully. Thus our “blurb” culture. Can you find an example of a
magazine or newspaper that DOESN’T have, as a part of its regular
offerings, dozens of instantly forgettable reviews of CDs, books, and
movies? (We can think of one. If you think of the same one, or another
that fits the bill, we’ll send you a Rake T-shirt. Send your answer here. First responder wins). It is not necessary for a good critical review to be long, but it helps.

Third.
This is the most difficult quality to explain and to achieve, but it is
what makes a really good piece of criticism something we tear out of a
magazine and carry around in our breast pocket: the ring of truth. The
beauty of a really good review by someone like Anthony Lane—or Peter
Shjelldahl, or Jacob Weisberg, or Chuck Klosterman—is that you know,
without reading the book, or seeing the film, or listening to the CD,
that the critic hit the nail on the head.

Now, we think
Weisberg hit several homeruns in his piece. He comments that Wolfe’s
descriptions of the modern campus are “excrutiatingly” detailed, but
Wolfe—being a journalist rather than a true novelist—writes like a
reporter. There are no meaningful descriptions of peoples’ motives,
only their actions and their appearances. (This is an editor’s constant
struggle, by the way, and it is what distinguishes a newspaper reporter
from a magazine writer. Reporters are very uncomfortable with subtle
description and analysis. If they can’t find a source to say it, and
another to confirm it, then they can’t write it. Writers have the
opposite problem—finding an authority greater than themselves.)
Weisberg also gets it just about exactly right when he says that
Wolfe’s peculiar magic is his ability to create page-turners; it’s
almost impossible to put Wolfe down, even when he’s at his worst.
Finally, the clencher: Who ever re-reads a Wolfe novel? No one. Running
our own mental check, we find that the only Wolfe book we’ve ever
reread was “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” and that, of course, is
not a novel; it is a work of non-fiction.

Compare “I Am
Charlotte Simmons” to, say, Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections,” or
Jonathan Lethem’s “Fortress of Solitude.” Both of those books have
short sections which describe life on the modern college campus— but
they are both better books, because they trade in interior, essential
truths rather than surface appearances and incidents. We’ve been
planning to reread both of those wonderful books from the moment we
finished them the first time.—The Editor in Cheese

Jarrett Murphy, in the Village Voice today, complains
that the media was quick to cover the infamous NBA brawl, and to put it
into saturation rotation. He enumerates the coverage in newspapers and
TV broadcasts, inferring that it was as salacious as it was
unwarranted. (Not “hard news!” Not hard news! Foul! Is anyone
listening?) He suggests that this is an example of the media adjusting
to changing times, and taking on a story with heavy “moral” overtones
and ramifications.

As a kicker—an afterthought, really—Murphy
grouses that it would be nice if journalists today would apply the same
hard questions to more serious moral catastrophes like “the war in
Iraq, the scenes of mad shoppers on the first day of the Christmas
shopping season, or other stories not featuring sweaty athletes.” (One
wonders if he reads his own paper, or values it so little as to not count it in his survey of big media.)

See,
this is the type of lazy criticism of “the press” that puts us into a
lather. Murphy carefully compiles all of the most egregious examples of
reporting on the Pacers-Pistons brawl, and then expects us to just
accept his broad generalization that no one anywhere has ever asked
serious questions about Iraq—or, for that matter, Christmas shopping.
Our esteemed reporter might argue that you can’t prove a negative—that
is, it’s hard to enumerate all the articles that have NOT been written.
But that’s only because he hasn’t tried very hard. In this day and age,
when anyone bitches that a story has not been adequately written about,
we have an automatic response: That’s just because you haven’t looked
very hard. (The more subtle and precise answer is this: That’s just
because the story hasn’t reached the critical mass where it assaults
you everywhere you turn—like the NBA brawl story. It’s not that the
story hasn’t been written. It’s that the reading public has not cared.
Sad, but true.)

We’re not crazy about media reporting or media
criticisim—mostly because we can’t escape the feeling that no one
really cares, out there in the real world. And then there is the more
substantive reason: Media criticism is often the most trite,
navel-gazing, uninteresting, and self-righteous sort of writing a
person can have the pleasure of not reading.—The Editor in Cheese

One of the things we miss most about TMFTML was his Monday-morning quarterbacking of the Sunday New York Times. (The critic became the critiqued, and that’s a helluva promotion! We like to believe we beat the Times to the punch bowl, though.)

TMFTML
somehow managed to scan and summarize the whole paper—usually in the
yellow haze of the “worst hangover ever”—from the Magazine to the
darkest recesses of Travel. He was a sort of pissy, Gen-X ombudsman
with a rapier wit.

We are much more piecemeal about the way we
pick through the Times. This is undoubdtedly a character flaw, but we
read the Sunday Times for pleasure, not for business. We often notice,
though, how the Gray Lady’s left hand and right don’t seem to be aware
of one another. We noted yesterday how the Magazine’s cover story on
“the overdesigned” life of American children was almost precisely the
same territory covered by Week In Review’s below-the-fold feature.

These
are great articles, of course, but they also have the strong smack of
trend stories, and speaking as an editor here, we say the fact that
they crop up in more than one place on one particular Sunday sort of
confirms this view. I wonder if there are uber-editors somewhere in the
Times who have steam coming out of their ears—just the way they do when
the New Yorker, or the Washington Post scoops them. (For the record, we
preferred the short and snappy Week in Review piece, which got straight
to the point with solid science and an impressionistic analysis. The
Magazine’s coverage was multi-faceted, practically the entire issue
turned over to a relatively simple conceit: Kids are not spending
enough time being kids anymore, and as a result, neither are they
growing up to be the adults they ought to be. We begin to understand
why one of TMFTML’s perennial complaints was just how trailing-edge the
Times can seem on stories like this.)

Some
other high points came in the Book Review—newly redesigned, with a more
humane display face, the anachronistic return to launching the cover
story right there on the cover, and the notable shift of contributors’
notes away from the column footers to the front of the book, much like
a modern magazine.

In these spiffy environs, we enjoyed Slate editor Jacob Weisberg’s angle on “Charlotte Simons,” and Tom Frank’s overview

of four new titles attempting to dismantle the “red-blue” cultural
divide, although it purported to survey four books, but really only
focused on the internecine squabble Frank wishes to pick with the
writers of “The Great Divide” (the “Metro Vs. Retro” folks).

More
important, we swelled with pride when we noticed the Times recommended
David Lebedof’s “The Uncivil War”— and several pages later, a solidly
positive review of Michael Dregni’s “Django.” Both are local heroes of
Twin Cities publishing, Lebedof a winner of a 1998 Minnesota Book
Award, and Dregni the editorial director of Voyageur Books over in
Stillwater. Nice work, gentlemen.

It’s not like we need to scan the Times in order to feel good about ourselves—well, maybe it is like that. —The Editor in Cheese

We were chatting yesterday with an editor at the New Yorker,
and the conversation turned on the role of design in modern magazines.
The New Yorker, of course, is an old-fashioned magazine that has not
changed in any major way for more than seventy-five years. To be sure,
there were some dramatic touches added under Tina Brown in the late
nineties—photography appeared for the first time, bylines went to the
tops of stories, a table of contents and letters to the editor were
published for the first time. But these were dramatic only in context.
Compared to all other magazines, the New Yorker remained an
intransigent old-timer that persisted in its jazz-age stylings. Most of
us still thank God for that.

Now
it was the view of my New Yorker friend that readers simply do not care
about design the way editors, publishers, artists, and designers do—in
other words, it’s only people in the publishing industry who care about
something so frivolous as page layout. I’m not sure I agree completely
with that view.

It’s easy to say there is little interest in
design when your magazine is the gold standard of narrative journalism
and cartoons, and when the design has not changed in three-quarters of
a century. My friend and I agreed, though, that design that is used to
cover up a lack of substance in a story is a bad thing. But I think it
should be possible to do both at the same time. (There are magazines,
like ESPN, for example, that are emphatically about image rather than
text— ESPN magazine was, after all, modelled on its television
namesake. They play by different rules, of course, or create their own.
Personally, I read Playboy for the articles, but I can see how some
people might look more to the art.)

In most magazines, there is
a rough balance between words and pictures. Good design is what marries
a good story to good art. You can’t just plop down on the page a big,
full-color photo, and then flow a story around it in whatever space
remains and expect it to “work.” It is a careful, exacting thing—more
art than science, surely—to make text and image play nicely and
complement each other. Even at a place like The New Yorker, where text
is king, there are still very serious design quandries every issue.

Their
particular cross to bear is that they don’t fit stories to space, but
vice versa. In other words, a story is written at whatever length it
takes to tell the story properly, and then the space on the page is
fitted to the words. All those clever little postage-stamp drawings?
They are called “space shims” to make a story end at the bottom of a
page, and not some other random place in the magazine. Carmine Peppe
was the legendary layout-editor at the New Yorker , one of its great
unsung heroes. For more than fifty years, he was responsible for the
incredibly delicate craft of space shimming, not unlike a master
carpenter.

So. Even when you think design doesn’t matter, design still matters.—The Editor in Cheese

Last night, the wife noticed that WCAL has now changed hands,
and is being operated by MPR. The wife is a contrarian in all things,
and she said the new announcers sounded “robotic.” But the wife is,
like us, a St. Olaf graduate. She is predisposed to resist change (like
us), especially when it involves her alma mater. Many non-alumni
listeners may be pleasantly surprised to learn that the classical
programming continues—at least for the time being.

Around here, we’ve already received one angry letter for our “Good Intentions”
which mentioned the controversy. In that piece, we did not so much
mourn the passing of WCAL—it’s not really going anywhere, after all.
And if you insist that WCAL IS dead in body and spirit, then MPR is
certainly the best possible heaven you could go to if you were a
deceased radio station. What we were complaining about was St. Olaf’s
decision to sell it in the first place.

It turns out that MPR may be the hero of this story. Despite the broad grumbling we hear among honorable people—
that MPR is growing more conservative and homogenous and powerful—we
suspect that St. Olaf would have sold the station to just about anyone,
so desperate were they to liquidate this asset. (St. Olaf alumni are
familiar with this strategy going back at least to the eighties, when
then-president Melvin George sold many of the priceless Persian rugs
that hung on the walls of Ole Rolvaag Library, just to drum up a little
cash.) In a press release issued yesterday, MPR made it clear that they
bought the charming little station “in an attempt to save the frequency
for public service programming. Other bidders proposed more narrow,
targeted program services.”

Coincidentally, we happened to
pick up Tom Wolfe’s new novel last night. It bears all the earmarks of
a classic Wolfe read— so many details so wrong, so much clanging
language, and yet so irritatingly readable. “My Name is Charlotte” is
set in a fictional college called Dupont. One of the things that Wolfe
gets exactly right is the strange form of loyalty that a good, solid
college generates in its students and alumni. These are, after all, the
formative years of our adult life. If you’re lucky enough to attend a
somewhat prestigious private college, and engaged with it enough to
hold on for four years, its astonishing the things you find yourself
remembering and saying about the experience later.

So our own
attachment to WCAL had quite a lot to do with its affiliation with that
old college on a hill. But it’s useful to remember that many people who
never knew or cared about WCAL’s ownership loved the station for what
it was, sui generis. They can take some consolation that some of the
station’s signature programming will live on, including “Favorites on
Friday” and—something MPR secretly coveted for decades—the St. Olaf
Choir Christmas Concert. Sometimes our self-important view of ourselves
and our institutions actually comports with the outside world’s
view.—The Editor in Cheese

This weekend, I was hanging around the house trying to beat
this nasty rhinovirus—a convenient excuse for laziness, I know. I
happened to be listening to MPR, and felt lucky to have the house and
the radio to myself for “This American Life,” one of life’s
serendipitious little pleasures. (I wouldn’t want to arrange my life
around a radio show, even if its host and I have a mutual appreciation society [that’s The Rake in his in-box there, thanks IG!].)

Anyway, the show was about amateur spying, which is a great subject.
The prelude was about a friend of Ira Glass’s who was a newspaper
reporter in the 1980s. He happened to be working late one night,
screwing around the way everyone does in an idle moment. When he
rebooted his computer, he used his boss’s username and made up a likely
password—and it worked! (I could go on at length about how depressing
this is that our lives are this predictable. For God’s sake, do NOT use
your spouse’s name, your child’s name, or your pet’s name as a
password.) Without even wanting to, he succumbed to what you could call
the hacker’s rush—the pure joy of trespassing with no other purpose in
mind than being where you aren’t supposed to be.

Well, the
reporter inevitably found the spreadsheets that listed the entire
company’s payroll. He was shocked to learn that he was the lowest paid
reporter on the paper, even though he had considerable seniority. This
forbidden knowledge poisoned the workplace for him; it even poisoned
his own self-image. Now you could argue that the truth, no matter how
painful, is better than functional delusion, and you’d have a point.

On
the other hand, I think it is possible to get too much information, and
to thus convert self-love into other-hatred. There are simply some
things you would rather not know about yourself, particularly what
others might think of you in the privacy of their own minds and emails.
You forget that others lack perspective on your life. You have to trust
that if they felt you really needed to know you’d screwed up, or that a
character flaw of yours was so distracting that it was ruining their
life, they’d be a man about it and tell you out loud.

When I was
a boy, I used to fantasize about reading other people’s thoughts. The
fantasy had obvious origins in being frustrated with understanding
where other people were coming from, and how they saw me—I didn’t even
know how to see myself, and it might have been useful to get access to
what others thought. But with adolescence, I realized just what a
terrible thing that particular super-power would be. You realize how
much of your interior life would be an embarassment if it screened in
public—most of it.

In this month’s cover story
about Eric Utne, we revisited an old newspaper article in which
employees of the Utne Reader confessed that they had made fun of their
boss. This phenomenon is universal, of course, but usually no one
intends for it to go public, because it can be so hurtful and prone to
exaggeration. When the private becomes public, the ugliness of the
human condition reveals itself—and only a true mensch like Utne can, as
he did, turn it into an opportunity to reflect and evolve.

Me? I would have fired the little shits.—The Editor in Sneeze