… then I’ll say this — The Atlantic Monthly has bad taste in women.  First, Caitlin Flanagan pillaged the deep well of writing mediocrity like a bathysphere.  (A poor attempt, yes, but I don’t see you trying!)  And now Ms. Tsing Loh, good Lord.  Once again, reading her essay, I found myself yelling to the chair, “what the hell is this?” 

Seriously – what the hell is it, Sandra?  Okay, cute title (“She’s Just Not That Into You”, purportedly a review of this book), good dek (“Women prefer food to sex with their husbands –and that’s OK”), but from there it goes horribly wrong. 

Did they publish the wrong draft?  Was there an editor?  It’s one big appalling mess — and the dildos … do they add something?  Are the cool kids all writing ”dildo”?  Hey, Beavis.  She said, “Dildo”. 

Oh brother. 

You know the people who talk and talk and talk at parties.  Well this one writes and writes and writes.  At least in reviews.  I don’t remember that she used to be so boring and pointless (pointless as in she never gets to one – or maybe I just don’t manage to hang in there long enough.) 

The insult to the injury of reading her piece is that I lost out on a column to her last year — a regional family mag in Orange County.  They must not have read her work.  Or maybe they’re crazy. 

Remember Very Short List? If you signed up yesterday like I suggested, you saw them in your inbox today plugging Infamous as the better Capote film. Then you said to yourself, “Duh! They should call it Very Obvious List.”

I feel like I already linked to this, New York Magazine’s Norman Mailer All-Time Enemies List. If I did, who cares, it’s beautiful. I could read it every day. I will. I do! I don’t think there’s enough good, old-fashioned cold cocking anymore. Every once in awhile you need a drink in the face, or a sucker punch … it cleans the blood, it’s good for the soul.

The best Mailer enemy is Gore Vidal –

Crime: Comparing The Prisoner of Sex to “three days of menstrual flow” and Mailer to Charles Manson.

Action Taken: Head-butting him in the green room of The Dick Cavett Show in 1971, then telling him, on-air, that he ruined Kerouac by sleeping with him. Six years later, he threw a drink at Vidal — and punched him — at a Lally Weymouth soiree.

Blowback: Still on the floor, Vidal said, “words fail Norman Mailer yet again.” Days later, Vidal went on Cavett’s show to assert that Mailer had — literally — stabbed his second wife in the back.

By the way, I got through Palimpsest. Hmm, I shouldn’t put it like that. I did roll my eyes every page, but kept turning them nonetheless. Gore gives himself all the good lines — his perogative, it’s his book — and the grumbling lines of his enemies serve him a little too well. (Vidal quotes Mailer, for instance, as saying he didn’t like him – Vidal – because he’s “too damn successful.”) But in the end he’s got a good story and he doesn’t hold back.

A. has adopted a very formal tone in his emails to me. He says things like, “That’s encouraging, what Jane expressed.” I suppose it’s serious business running a company and calls for big formal words.

That’s all I have. Get out there and punch someone!

One day I hope they’ll put out a collection of Benjamin Schwarz‘s reviews. I rarely read the books he trots out, but relish the crisp wispy writing he wraps them up in. (Yes, I know “crisp” and “wispy” don’t work, but I like them, they sound good.)

Take this, for example, from his review of three new works on Cary Grant. (This is Schwarz speaking, not quotes from the books):

“That same year … he also made The Awful Truth — and seemingly from nowhere the Cary Grant persona gloriously appeared, fully formed. All at once there was the detached, distracted wit; the knowing charm; the arch self-mockery; the bemused awareness of his audience, with whom he was sharing a joke … the perfectly timed stylized comedic movements — the cocked head, the double takes. …”

Who needs the books?

Oh, Richard Clarke is guest-blogging at Powells this week. That’s all I have to say about that.

… A. has been watching a lot of the debates: Lieberman / Shlesinger / Lamont; Casey / Santorum … our Gubernatorial race here. I forget who else. I can’t watch them for long — I’m decluttering for crying out loud, but I do see a familiar trend. Republicans working themselves all up about sex. Good lord boys, get a grip.