Now that Jimmy Breslin-so-not Mike Barnicle is back in his shell, msnbc Hardball host and Jimmy Breslin-in-his-dreams Chris Matthews is back in the saddle.
Here Media Matters observes Matthews as he expounds on gender, history, and politics. Let’s listen in!
As Media Matters has noted, Matthews — who on his June 24, 2007, program said that he “love[s] gender politics” — has frequently focused on gender issues when discussing Clinton. He has said that “some men” say Clinton’s voice sounds like “fingernails on a blackboard“; wondered if Clinton is “a convincing mom“; claimed that “men don’t knock Hillary” and that they are “are afraid” to criticize her. He once also claimed that her criticism of the Bush administration’s homeland security spending priorities made her look “witchy” and has wondered if there is a “gigantic monster,” a “big, green, horny-headed … monster of anti-Hillaryism that hasn’t shown itself.”
Matthews’ discussion of Edwards’ height and Clinton’s voice came about three hours after a conversation on Hardball about gay marriage, during which he turned to Karen Finney, spokeswoman for the Democratic National Committee, and said, “[Y]ou don’t love your wife, do you? I’m just kidding.” Moments later, Matthews said: “Let’s get back to the debating point here before we get too frivolous.”
[END]
And now for a snippet from the guy who isn’t a Jimmy Breslin wannabe:
[From Democracy Now, it's Jimmy Breslin talking with Amy Goodman about media coverage of the 2004 Democratic Convention. link here http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/07/29/1442255]
AMY GOODMAN: Some say that because it’s so scripted, there’s nothing to talk about.
JIMMY BRESLIN: I don’t care. That’s none of your business what it is. Your business is to write it. If it’s lousy, then you’re running a lousy convention. If it’s good, you run a good convention. But you are running a convention of the Democratic Party, which is producing a candidate to run for president and you don’t want to cover it? You don’t have it on your air? Then you shouldn’t have the station. Awful. That’s a tremendous thing that happened.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you think that this goes hand in hand with the way the media covers the lead up to the invasion?
JIMMY BRESLIN: Exactly — they don’t care. They got good jobs. These people are too well off. Ever look at them? There is no curiosity. Their curiosity is where they are going out tonight or what party they go to. There’s no curiosity here. None whatsoever. And also, they can’t write too good. 37 words in a lead sentence, and they expect the public to follow and read. Norman Mailer would do 16 or John Steinbeck 14, they do 47 to show that they went to Tufts and they did 10 papers before this.
AMY GOODMAN: Pulitzer Prize journalist Jimmy Breslin. He writes for “Newsday.”
When I was a kid and teenager I watched Dick Cavett, David Susskind and and Wm F Buckley’s Firing Line. I loved how guests like Norman Mailer and Germaine Greer and Gore Vidal would get into big literary and political fights about things like Tolstoy, Vietnam, and sex. It was fun, and the guests could speak without censorship, it seemed.
Now Charlie Rose asks his fawning, interminable non-questions and I nod off. And who else is there? Oprah?
This Slate piece reminded me of the good old days.
The NYTimes Caryn James celebrates the Jane Austen
Chic-lit Industrial Complex:
A few quotes:
"How did this early-19th-century novelist become the chick-lit,
chick-flick queen for today?"
(snip)
"Her ironic take on society is delivered in a reassuring, sisterly voice,
as if she were part Jon Stewart, part Oprah Winfrey. " (???)
(snip)
"And while Austen’s era, with its rigid code of social
rules, must have been repressive if you lived in it, when prettily depicted
on screen it can seem positively peaceful and stable, a respite from
today’s fraught, slippery world of quick hook-ups, divorce and family
counseling."
Um. Yeah. Repression sucks. Good thing it goes away "when prettily
depicted". And how did "family counseling" make its way here??
And the piece de repulsion:
"Marsha Huff, the president of the Jane Austen Society
of North America (like so many Janeites, she’s not an
academic; she’s a tax lawyer) points to the scene in
“Pride and Prejudice” in which Lady Catherine (Judi
Dench in the ’05 film), tries to bully Elizabeth into
giving Darcy up because she is his social inferior.
“Elizabeth reacts exactly the way we would react: she
is insulted, she’s indignant at the way this dinosaur
from another era would try to tell this intelligent,
beautiful young woman what to do,” Ms. Huff said in an
interview.
And however much society has changed, Austen’s heroines —
unlike the Brontës’ — deal with the believable, timeless
obstacles of class, money and
misunderstanding, which make her works
adaptable to any era. As Ms. Huff said:
“Everyone thinks she’s Elizabeth Bennet;
not everyone thinks she’s Jane Eyre.
Everyone knows a young woman trying to
decide if the guy she’s attracted to is
Mr. Right. Not everyonemeets a Mr. Right
who has a mad wife in the attic.”
*******************************************
..."dinasaur from another era"??? The tax lawyer must be drunk. And the
Brontes characters are just so...irrelevant, so not "believable." whatever
that means.
such a load of crap! As if Austen's novels are a girl's "how to" on
dealing with man-trouble. An Austen scholar of my acquaintance
(Hi A.B. M., PhD!) notes that as a woman author,
Austen’s place as a member of English
Literature’s canon is precarious, easily ghettoized and
trivialized. Chick-lit might taste nice, but it's not art. .
It's pathetic to see a female journo like
C James so gleefully piling onto the ignorance bandwagon.
Next thing ya know they'll be selling a Jane Austen Action Figure…
Amy Hempel, short story writer, is spending a rainy morning at a Madison Avenue diner.She is 55 years old. Her flowing hair is silvery-white. Her speech is clear, but careful. She sometimes edits herself as she talks or advances her thoughts as if placing one foot slowly before the other.
And here it is: the secret, maybe.
Howdy…Stu here, your hamster host of the 2nd edition of ScribbleTalk. This week we’ll look at the latest kurfuffle or imbroglio or dustup or what-have-you in the literary wold.
In the NY Times, David Orr takes aim at New Yorker poet/editor Dana Goodyear’s recent piece about the well-endowed ($200 mil) Poetry Foundation. I bring it to your attention as one example of the way major “serious” magazines and newspapers have replaced publishing actual fiction and poetry with gossip about fiction writers and poets,editors and benefactors. Orr starts out this way:
And further on:
Ok, but Orr and the Times do it too – they all prefer literary controversy over literature.
Oh alright I admit that it’s a pretty juicy fight (hamsters are suckers for a mudfest). The two articles together dispute just who is getting published and fawned over in posh venues like The New Yorker and who is getting funded by the massively deep-pockets of The Poetry Foundation.
I meanwhile nibble on cracker crumbs that fall off whatsleft’s plate, and wish she would drop more cheese.
I will leave you with a poem by somebody rightly feted and too-soon mourned:
Among the Narcissi
Spry, wry, and gray as these March sticks,
Percy bows, in his blue peajacket, among the narcissi.
He is recuperating from something on the lung.
The narcissi, too, are bowing to some big thing :
It rattles their stars on the green hill where Percy
Nurses the hardship of his stitches, and walks and walks.
There is a dignity to this; there is a formality-
The flowers vivid as bandages, and the man mending.
They bow and stand : they suffer such attacks!
And the octogenarian loves the little flocks.
He is quite blue; the terrible wind tries his breathing.
The narcissi look up like children, quickly and whitely.
Sylvia Plath
The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel is my most recent read. As Rick Moody says in his introduction to this collection, “It’s all about the sentences.” Boy can she write.
David Weich at Powells.com interviewed Hempel and here’s what she says about how hard it can be to write the “truth.”
And Later in the interview:
Filed under: writing
Hi kids! Stu the scribbling gerbil here (or mouse? Hamster maybe? No clue). Anyhoo, I’ll be your host of “ScribbleTalk” here at my 99 cents. It’s the cozy spot where we meet now and then to drop our pencils and chitchat about writin’.
As a small rodent of some sort, I can’t say I read much. But I like pencils. Did you know that if you gnaw lightly on a pencil you’ll soon have enough shavings to construct a soft tiny nest?
But I digest.
Have a peek below at the first paragraph of Ms. Ohlin’s story. Good example of how to set the mood:
“It was a summer of disasters. I was sixteen and just starting to relax fully into my vacation when my father took my mother and me out to dinner at the New Chinatown and told us over the Kung Pao chicken that he had fallen in love with his law partner, Margaret, and the two of them were “going away for a while” to “sort things out.” While he was talking, he twisted a corner of the tablecloth into a ring in his right hand. My mother, leaning back in the corner of the booth, said, “Oh, for crying out loud.” She sounded annoyed. She was drinking a Mai Tai, as usual, and she had given me the umbrella, also as usual. Tonight’s was blue and I twirled it between my fingers. I was always pleasantly surprised that it really opened and closed, just like a real umbrella. I stuck it into a piece of my chicken and moved some baby carrots and water chestnuts into an arrangement around it, like small, edible patio furniture. No one said anything. I stared at the couple at the table next to us, who were sharing a Volcano, holding hands over the blue flame in the center of it. They saw me looking and loosed their hands as if they were embarrassed.”
_________________________________________
Till next time – keep scribblin!
Stu.
Filed under: writing
I liked this. It’s about writing poetry but its pretty good advise for other kinds of writing too.
And she includes this poem by Archibald Macleish:
A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,
Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,
Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown -
A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.
*
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,
Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,
Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind -
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.
*
A poem should be equal to
Not true.
For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.
For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea -
A poem should not mean
But be.
____________________________
Not bad.
