"No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money," Samuel Johnson proclaimed. Wodehouse demurred a bit, but he was largely in agreement. "Poets, as a class, are business men," he wrote, "Shakespeare describes the poet's eye as rolling in a fine frenzy from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, and giving to airy nothing a local habitation and a name, but in practice you will find that one corner of that eye is generally glued on the royalty returns." For a man who hated banking, he was certainly shrewd about making money. "Never sell once what you can sell twice" is a time-honored journalistic principle--to which Wodehouse was an enthusiastic adherent. Indeed, he bragged, he could beat that: he once sold a work no less than four times--first, to a British magazine for serialization, then to a British publisher, then to an American magazine, and finally to an American publisher.

Labels: I heart EW

--Gene Weingarten

Labels: journos

I was a bit surprised that neither the discussion of Linda Hirshman's article about the feminist movement nor the original piece bring up what might well be the main problem with "intersectionality," that is, with a "feminism" that has morphed into a universalist struggle against oppression, namely that some fights for the underdog contradict the more basic principles of feminism. When discussing, say, radical Islam (or radical anything else, but Islam is the one that comes up the most), while a feminist would condemn certain practices or traditions, a "feminist" who is simply a leftist or a humanist will point to the oppression Muslim men face in this or that country; will insist that Muslim women are more oppressed as Muslims than as women; and in extreme cases, will denounce as sell-outs those Muslim women who subscribe to a 'Western' feminism.

To put fighting anti-Semitism above all else is, goes this line of thought, a waste of energy, one could even say, it's like a "feminism" centered around the plight of women who, relatively speaking, are not that oppressed. Do Jews in America, in France, in Israel, have it worse than the rest of humanity, now, in the year 2008?

Labels: gender wars

[F]eminists weren't going to do things the old-fashioned, "political" way. Instead, faced with criticism that the movement was too white and middle-class, many influential feminist thinkers conceded that issues affecting mostly white middle-class women -- such as the corporate glass ceiling or the high cost of day care -- should not significantly concern the feminist movement. Particularly in academic circles, only issues that invoked the "intersectionality" of many overlapping oppressions were deemed worthy. Moreover, that concern must include the whole weight of those oppressions. In other words, since racism hurts black women, feminists must fight not only racist misogyny but racism in any form; not only rape as an instrument of war, but war itself. The National Organization for Women (NOW) eventually amended its mission statement to include interrelated oppressions.

[snip]

Meanwhile, white middle-class women, who had started the movement, had already gotten a lot of payoff from the removal of many gender-only barriers, such as sex-segregated help-wanted ads, two-tiered wage structures and prohibitions against pregnant schoolteachers. Once the most insulting abuses were removed, many of these women, somewhat ignobly, lost interest. Research among U.S. college women in 1987 (a largely white group) revealed that only a small proportion called themselves feminists; in 1989, a Time/CNN poll revealed the same thing.

Labels: gender wars

Welcome to the Land of the Park Slope Stroller Mom, where every compliment is a veiled insult, and every choice no matter how mundane or personal - home birth vs. hospital, disposable vs. cloth diapers - is taken as a declaration of your progressive bona fides (or lack thereof). If you're not run down by a passing Bugaboo stroller, you'll likely soon be by the nonstop passive-aggressive sniping of the other mothers. "You let Baby Bjorn have non-organic carrot sticks? What kind of monster are you?"

Labels: gender wars, shameless self-promotion

In the days when American Jewish fiction was at the high-water mark of literary prestige, Bernard Malamud was universally acknowledged as one of its three leading figures (the other two being Saul Bellow and Philip Roth). From the mid-1950's through the late 60's, he was considered a master of the American short story, and taken with the utmost seriousness as a novelist. He received every major literary award in the United States, and achieved significant commercial success with his 1966 Pulitzer-prize-winning bestseller, The Fixer. Four decades later, however, Malamud's name is "fading, his readership and literary standing in danger of decline." These are the words of Philip Davis, whose Bernard Malamud: A Writer's Life is the first full-scale biography of, in Davis's estimation, a "major writer of the 20th century." Davis is a sensitive and intelligent researcher, and his book is a valiant effort at reclamation; but he does not answer the central issue he raises: why would the work of a major writer be at such risk of disappearing?

Labels: lit crit, shameless self-promotion