Bad writing is so commonplace in my life that I usually just shrug it off. Most of my reading, after all, is journalism, i.e. items generally cranked out under heavy deadline pressure by lightly-educated mediocrities, who get precious little incentive to do better, whether in cash, esprit de corps, or editorial whip-cracking.
Nor are winged words exactly flying from the keyboards of other writers today. From ivory-tower theorists (yawn) to corporate shills (shaddup!) to best-selling fictioneers (good luck abolishing reality, dreamers), the vast herd seems to lumber along in linguistic lockstep, stoically and unheroically, as if they were all ordinary shmoes and workaday wage-slaves trudging down some well-worn path to wherever. Only their degree of trite expression differs. If one or two among them do manage to transcend the banal norm, it is only because they were bitten by a radioactive poet and/or have a freakish amount of fire in the belly. The rest are just marking time. But hey, what were you expecting?C'est la vie.
And yet, and yet. Despite taking the chattering classes with the above grain of salt, on many a not-so-rare occasion some extra-horrible specimen of mangled language smacks me upside the head. and my sang-froid dissolves as I mutter dark profanities about morons and the goddamn pathetic education system.
The impetus for my latest outburst is, unsurprisingly, some newsprint from the heaps, specifically...
****
Composus interruptus again...
Showing posts with label Mencken. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mencken. Show all posts
Thursday, August 16, 2012
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Holocaust, Irgun, hot reactions...
Slice of blogosphere, from the National Post's "Full Comment" site:
(and I hope everyone can guess who "Gaard4thee" is...)
Larry Zolf: Izzy Asper and the Irgun
Posted: December 02, 2008, 5:53 PM by Marni Soupcoff
Larry Zolf
In his biography of Izzy Asper, Peter C. Newman says that Asper was a fan of the Irgun, the revisionist Jewish terrorists led by Menachem Begin who blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. That makes Izzy a bit of a Jewish radical, says Newman.
This got me thinking. The Post has not said a word about Anna Porter’s latest book: Kastner’s Train, The True Story of Rezso Kastner, Unknkown Hero of the Holocaust. Kastner saved the lives of Hungarian Jews like Peter Munk.The Irgun assassinated Kastner in Palestine. The Irgun says that Kastner dealt with the Nazis and betrayed the Jews.
Anna Porter’s book on the genocide of Hungary’s Jewish communities is the best book on the Holocaust by a Gentile ever written and rivals Prof. Michael Maris’s holocaust work on the subject. Anna Porter is an absolute marvel as an historian of the Nazis and the Jews in Hungary. Her book gives you the smell of death of Adolf Eichmann. Anna Porter insists that Kastner has not been given his due, his just recognition.
Izzy and the Irgun don’t see things that way. Anyone who dealt with the Nazis was a traitor to the Jewish people, says Izzy and says the Irgun and Menachem Begin. Anna Porter presents a great case.
Personally I grew up with the Irgun. Ben Hecht, too of the Irgun, whom Anna Porter dismisses, was my favourite Jewish writer. Hecht and Charles MacArthur wrote the classic “Front Page” in 20th century movies. Ben Hecht’s autobiography: A Child of the Century, was the best growing-up-Jewish-in-America book ever written when I was in college.Hecht was a friend of John Barrymore and W.C. Fields. Hecht once said Hollywood was so censorious it removed the word ‘nuts’ for fear it might offend a sensitive masturbator.
Hecht and the Irgun hated the British treatment of the death camp survivors. So did I. In my bar mitzvah speech I said the Labour party’s Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin were Nazis and Harold Laski a Jewish self-hater.
He was Hollywood to me. In Canada all we had were Wayne and Shuster and Bert Pearl. In the U.S. NBC, CBS, and ABC were Jewish owned and Jewish staffed. In Canada at the CBC, I and Jason Moscowitz were the two token Jewish reporters at CBC News.
I was pro-Irgun in the Asper sense but I didn’t hate the British. I married one.
Anna Porter is too hard on Hecht and Begin but she’s dead on in saying that Hecht’s book, Perfidy, on Kastner is very, very much over the top. Porter knows her Israeli and Jewish politics well. Anna Porter prefers Golda Meir and Itzak Rabin to Begin and Asper. So do I for the most part.
Still, Izzy Asper had his reasons to not like Golda Meir and Itzak Rabin. They were too socialist for Izzy. That’s too bad. Today Izzy would have been the perfect reviewer for the National Post of the Anna Porter book. -->
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by Tim Cares
Dec 02 20086:50 PM
Israel elects terrorists as their PMs but the Palestinians can't.
I guess it's a case of do as I say...
by Jackal1234
Dec 02 20086:59 PM
wow tim ... you're a helluva lefty mouthpiece apologist.
yasser arafat was the biggest terrorist of them all and was the leader of the PLO for how long 30 years?
you are a symbol of what is wrong with our country today.
by Gaard4thee
Dec 02 200810:55 PM
So, re the "goyish but good" books, was Harold Flender's Rescue in Denmark on the short-list? Or was it disqualified because technically the Holocaust didn't happen in Denmark?
But seriously, interesting review of an interesting book, especially for those of us who agonize about all the damn walls between "us" and "them".
I think H. L. Mencken would have been a better reviewer than Izzy, though. His 1938 newspaper column "Help for the Jews" showed he was one of the very few who understood Kristallnacht for what it was, and instantly understood that German-Jewish emigration, fast, was the only solution. Oddly enough he is now labelled an "anti-semite" by just about everyone...
Intellectual life in the West, I tell ya...
(and I hope everyone can guess who "Gaard4thee" is...)
Larry Zolf: Izzy Asper and the Irgun
Posted: December 02, 2008, 5:53 PM by Marni Soupcoff
Larry Zolf
In his biography of Izzy Asper, Peter C. Newman says that Asper was a fan of the Irgun, the revisionist Jewish terrorists led by Menachem Begin who blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. That makes Izzy a bit of a Jewish radical, says Newman.
This got me thinking. The Post has not said a word about Anna Porter’s latest book: Kastner’s Train, The True Story of Rezso Kastner, Unknkown Hero of the Holocaust. Kastner saved the lives of Hungarian Jews like Peter Munk.The Irgun assassinated Kastner in Palestine. The Irgun says that Kastner dealt with the Nazis and betrayed the Jews.
Anna Porter’s book on the genocide of Hungary’s Jewish communities is the best book on the Holocaust by a Gentile ever written and rivals Prof. Michael Maris’s holocaust work on the subject. Anna Porter is an absolute marvel as an historian of the Nazis and the Jews in Hungary. Her book gives you the smell of death of Adolf Eichmann. Anna Porter insists that Kastner has not been given his due, his just recognition.
Izzy and the Irgun don’t see things that way. Anyone who dealt with the Nazis was a traitor to the Jewish people, says Izzy and says the Irgun and Menachem Begin. Anna Porter presents a great case.
Personally I grew up with the Irgun. Ben Hecht, too of the Irgun, whom Anna Porter dismisses, was my favourite Jewish writer. Hecht and Charles MacArthur wrote the classic “Front Page” in 20th century movies. Ben Hecht’s autobiography: A Child of the Century, was the best growing-up-Jewish-in-America book ever written when I was in college.Hecht was a friend of John Barrymore and W.C. Fields. Hecht once said Hollywood was so censorious it removed the word ‘nuts’ for fear it might offend a sensitive masturbator.
Hecht and the Irgun hated the British treatment of the death camp survivors. So did I. In my bar mitzvah speech I said the Labour party’s Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin were Nazis and Harold Laski a Jewish self-hater.
He was Hollywood to me. In Canada all we had were Wayne and Shuster and Bert Pearl. In the U.S. NBC, CBS, and ABC were Jewish owned and Jewish staffed. In Canada at the CBC, I and Jason Moscowitz were the two token Jewish reporters at CBC News.
I was pro-Irgun in the Asper sense but I didn’t hate the British. I married one.
Anna Porter is too hard on Hecht and Begin but she’s dead on in saying that Hecht’s book, Perfidy, on Kastner is very, very much over the top. Porter knows her Israeli and Jewish politics well. Anna Porter prefers Golda Meir and Itzak Rabin to Begin and Asper. So do I for the most part.
Still, Izzy Asper had his reasons to not like Golda Meir and Itzak Rabin. They were too socialist for Izzy. That’s too bad. Today Izzy would have been the perfect reviewer for the National Post of the Anna Porter book. -->
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Comments (3)
Send to a friend
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by Tim Cares
Dec 02 20086:50 PM
Israel elects terrorists as their PMs but the Palestinians can't.
I guess it's a case of do as I say...
by Jackal1234
Dec 02 20086:59 PM
wow tim ... you're a helluva lefty mouthpiece apologist.
yasser arafat was the biggest terrorist of them all and was the leader of the PLO for how long 30 years?
you are a symbol of what is wrong with our country today.
by Gaard4thee
Dec 02 200810:55 PM
So, re the "goyish but good" books, was Harold Flender's Rescue in Denmark on the short-list? Or was it disqualified because technically the Holocaust didn't happen in Denmark?
But seriously, interesting review of an interesting book, especially for those of us who agonize about all the damn walls between "us" and "them".
I think H. L. Mencken would have been a better reviewer than Izzy, though. His 1938 newspaper column "Help for the Jews" showed he was one of the very few who understood Kristallnacht for what it was, and instantly understood that German-Jewish emigration, fast, was the only solution. Oddly enough he is now labelled an "anti-semite" by just about everyone...
Intellectual life in the West, I tell ya...
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Review: The Diary of H. L. Mencken (Edmonton Journal, March 10, 1990)
Herewith, the clippings-flagship, not my first published book review--that was a whimsical buffoonery upon a self-published paperback Seventeen Days in Tehran (which viewed the Iranian revolution optimistically circa 1980--one wonders if its rosy-visioned author is still as exultantly hopeful about Khomeini's legacy today. Nor was this Mencken autopsy the first judgement to rake in dollars; that was a review of Andrew Malcolm's The Canadians, done for the late, great, sanctified (or is that just sanctimonious?) Alberta Report...yeah, an amusing and instructive story behind THAT, which I'm saving for a projected volume of memoirs .
But the Mencken Diary review was my first Important Book dissected for a Major Publication, so I really sweated to give it some magisterial style and substance.The anti-climax came as I repeatedly tucked my precious baby into job-applications, and just as repeatedly had HR people neglecting to get back to me.
Cause and effect, perhaps? Who knows.
The review was printed under the headline "Was Mencken an objectionable bigot or simply a wit misunderstood by boobs?" The venue being sort of high-profile, I hoped my contribution might help kill the lingering accusation of racism against Mencken (via the mock-theory of Mencken's "hexaphenic personality"--ho ho--since I knew from long experience that any direct disproof of racism is ipso facto futile. A racism charge always sticks like napalm).
And sure enough, it continues to stick to H. L. Mencken, despite a thorough refutation of his "anti-semitism" in the American Scholar about the same time -- which I didn't uncover until years later, or I would have added to my below citation of Lawrence Spivak the additional fact that Spivak was still alive (and over 90) when the Diary was published, and when consulted he called the anti-semitism charge nonsense. Despite this and other vindications, the racism smear persists, e.g. in the Globe and Mail...
EUREKA! I actually found the Mop and Pail quote in the office mess!!! -- Jan. 25, 2003, pD7, in "America's skeptical sage" [review of Terry Teachout's biography, The Skeptic] which states, "Certainly, Mencken was an anti-Semite."
Horseshit. Read the American Scholar article. Or my, um, masterpiece below. For what it's worth. From the Edmonton Journal, March 10, 1990:
The Diary of H. L. Mencken
Edited by Charles Fecher
Alfred Knopf Inc.
477pp., $41
During his lifetime H. L. Mencken had a genius for scandalizing the boobs with his satire and criticism, and even now, 36 years after his death, he still inspires controversy.
The latest kerfuffle arose with the release of this diary, whose contents revived the charges of anti-semitism and anti-black bigotry which had occasionally dogged him before, though never too seriously.
Opinions differ as to whether the Diary validates the charges. Jonathan Alter recently went off the deep end in Newsweek, calling Mencken a "conventional bigot" -- which is rather absurd, since conventional bigots don't usually stay on amiable terms with dozens of Jews, as Mencken did, most notably with his publisher and close friend Alfred Knopf, who in 1980 described their relationship as "perfect" -- an astounding enough fact in any writer-publisher relationship, let alone one with a bigoted goy.
Furthermore, conventional bigots don't usually play a key role in.sparking and nurturing a black literary movement, as Mencken did with the 1920s Harlem Renaissance.
Douglas Fetherling, writing in Saturday Night, is inclined to deflate the whole controversy, saying that while Mencken had a penchant for ethnic characterizations typical of his time, his only real hatred was of the British. Curiously, in 1946 the British ambassador asks Mencken if he is anti-English. According to his diary, Mencken replies, "This was a gross calumny, circulated by Japs.".
Diary editor Fecher merely tut-tuts what he sees as Mencken's paternalistic attitude towards blacks, but he does a dramatic flip-flop on anti-semitism. Where he once defended Mencken on the charge, he now believes it is true, mostly due to Mencken's copious use of the word "Jew."
The word, of course, usually has nasty overtones, but this isn't generally true here. For instance, Mencken calls Lawrence Spivak a "young Harvard Jew," but his assessment of him is completely favorable.
Clearly a more sophisticated explanation is needed. Maybe Mencken wasn't entirely a bigot, but merely had a hexaphenic multiple personality. In Phase One he was a raving anti-semite, labeling two businessmen as "dreadful kikes." In Phase Two he was a sweet liberal, frowning on the anti-semitism of Theodore Dreiser and Gerald K. Smith. In Phase Three he waffled, giving mixed reviews to Jews such as Morris Fishbein and Charles Angoff.
In Phase Four Mencken suggested that blacks are superstitious. In Phase Five he championed black journalist George Schuyler over the "dunderheads" (i.e. whites) at the Baltimore Sun. In Phase Six he described a negro chauffeur as uneducated but smarter than any New Deal economist.
This explanation should satisfy all factions in the bigotry feud, leaving us to the remaining 95 per cent of the Diary, which is far more interesting. It is a rich hodge-podge, the random gossip of a wide-ranging and very well-connected writer, editor and journalist.
Some of it is ancient news, like the drinking habits of Sinclair Lewis, some of it is mundane, like the details of his personal health,, but mostly it is alive and sublime. It covers everything from Mencken's bad luck in cultivating women writers, to jokes about William Randolph Hearst and physicist Robert Millikan, to the medical details of Al Capone's syphilis.
One of the best anecdotes comes from Dr. Frances Townsend, the old-age pension crusader, who confesses to Mencken that he once committed euthanasia on an unfortunate newborn. Mencken knows a good story when he he hears it, and he is wise enough to repeat this poignant tale without comment.
It's a pity that some critics of this book didn't exercise the same judiciousness.
# # # #
Since there is a new book just out, saying nice things about William Randolph Hearst, at least in his earlier life, perhaps the joke Mencken passed along about him should be made explicit -- some contemporary wiseacre quipped that "William Randolph Hearst married a prostitute, and dragged her down to his level."
That was pretty strong stuff in those prim, puritan days, and reminds us that Citizen Kane didn't happen by accident.
PS: If you are wondering who the hell Lawrence Spivak might be, he was one of the people Mencken gladly approved as his successor to the editorship of the American Mercury. A curious act, coming from an "anti-semite" eh?
But the Mencken Diary review was my first Important Book dissected for a Major Publication, so I really sweated to give it some magisterial style and substance.The anti-climax came as I repeatedly tucked my precious baby into job-applications, and just as repeatedly had HR people neglecting to get back to me.
Cause and effect, perhaps? Who knows.
The review was printed under the headline "Was Mencken an objectionable bigot or simply a wit misunderstood by boobs?" The venue being sort of high-profile, I hoped my contribution might help kill the lingering accusation of racism against Mencken (via the mock-theory of Mencken's "hexaphenic personality"--ho ho--since I knew from long experience that any direct disproof of racism is ipso facto futile. A racism charge always sticks like napalm).
And sure enough, it continues to stick to H. L. Mencken, despite a thorough refutation of his "anti-semitism" in the American Scholar about the same time -- which I didn't uncover until years later, or I would have added to my below citation of Lawrence Spivak the additional fact that Spivak was still alive (and over 90) when the Diary was published, and when consulted he called the anti-semitism charge nonsense. Despite this and other vindications, the racism smear persists, e.g. in the Globe and Mail...
EUREKA! I actually found the Mop and Pail quote in the office mess!!! -- Jan. 25, 2003, pD7, in "America's skeptical sage" [review of Terry Teachout's biography, The Skeptic] which states, "Certainly, Mencken was an anti-Semite."
Horseshit. Read the American Scholar article. Or my, um, masterpiece below. For what it's worth. From the Edmonton Journal, March 10, 1990:
The Diary of H. L. Mencken
Edited by Charles Fecher
Alfred Knopf Inc.
477pp., $41
During his lifetime H. L. Mencken had a genius for scandalizing the boobs with his satire and criticism, and even now, 36 years after his death, he still inspires controversy.
The latest kerfuffle arose with the release of this diary, whose contents revived the charges of anti-semitism and anti-black bigotry which had occasionally dogged him before, though never too seriously.
Opinions differ as to whether the Diary validates the charges. Jonathan Alter recently went off the deep end in Newsweek, calling Mencken a "conventional bigot" -- which is rather absurd, since conventional bigots don't usually stay on amiable terms with dozens of Jews, as Mencken did, most notably with his publisher and close friend Alfred Knopf, who in 1980 described their relationship as "perfect" -- an astounding enough fact in any writer-publisher relationship, let alone one with a bigoted goy.
Furthermore, conventional bigots don't usually play a key role in.sparking and nurturing a black literary movement, as Mencken did with the 1920s Harlem Renaissance.
Douglas Fetherling, writing in Saturday Night, is inclined to deflate the whole controversy, saying that while Mencken had a penchant for ethnic characterizations typical of his time, his only real hatred was of the British. Curiously, in 1946 the British ambassador asks Mencken if he is anti-English. According to his diary, Mencken replies, "This was a gross calumny, circulated by Japs.".
Diary editor Fecher merely tut-tuts what he sees as Mencken's paternalistic attitude towards blacks, but he does a dramatic flip-flop on anti-semitism. Where he once defended Mencken on the charge, he now believes it is true, mostly due to Mencken's copious use of the word "Jew."
The word, of course, usually has nasty overtones, but this isn't generally true here. For instance, Mencken calls Lawrence Spivak a "young Harvard Jew," but his assessment of him is completely favorable.
Clearly a more sophisticated explanation is needed. Maybe Mencken wasn't entirely a bigot, but merely had a hexaphenic multiple personality. In Phase One he was a raving anti-semite, labeling two businessmen as "dreadful kikes." In Phase Two he was a sweet liberal, frowning on the anti-semitism of Theodore Dreiser and Gerald K. Smith. In Phase Three he waffled, giving mixed reviews to Jews such as Morris Fishbein and Charles Angoff.
In Phase Four Mencken suggested that blacks are superstitious. In Phase Five he championed black journalist George Schuyler over the "dunderheads" (i.e. whites) at the Baltimore Sun. In Phase Six he described a negro chauffeur as uneducated but smarter than any New Deal economist.
This explanation should satisfy all factions in the bigotry feud, leaving us to the remaining 95 per cent of the Diary, which is far more interesting. It is a rich hodge-podge, the random gossip of a wide-ranging and very well-connected writer, editor and journalist.
Some of it is ancient news, like the drinking habits of Sinclair Lewis, some of it is mundane, like the details of his personal health,, but mostly it is alive and sublime. It covers everything from Mencken's bad luck in cultivating women writers, to jokes about William Randolph Hearst and physicist Robert Millikan, to the medical details of Al Capone's syphilis.
One of the best anecdotes comes from Dr. Frances Townsend, the old-age pension crusader, who confesses to Mencken that he once committed euthanasia on an unfortunate newborn. Mencken knows a good story when he he hears it, and he is wise enough to repeat this poignant tale without comment.
It's a pity that some critics of this book didn't exercise the same judiciousness.
# # # #
Since there is a new book just out, saying nice things about William Randolph Hearst, at least in his earlier life, perhaps the joke Mencken passed along about him should be made explicit -- some contemporary wiseacre quipped that "William Randolph Hearst married a prostitute, and dragged her down to his level."
That was pretty strong stuff in those prim, puritan days, and reminds us that Citizen Kane didn't happen by accident.
PS: If you are wondering who the hell Lawrence Spivak might be, he was one of the people Mencken gladly approved as his successor to the editorship of the American Mercury. A curious act, coming from an "anti-semite" eh?
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
A late gun for culture
Does anyone read blogs? If a journal falls in the cyberforest, is the bear Catholic? Hm. The only blog I've ever read (once, partly) was by a guy from Firesign Theatre who was writing a weird detective story with a bird (yes, a bird) as the shamus. I don't cruise the web much at all, to tell the truth. Old-fashioned and print-centred--that's your correspondent.
In fact, like most Firesign, the blog was wonderful, but at the risk of sending thee rapidly to a better site (More Sugar I seem to recall) let me leave my endorsement at that. The rest is Jens-promotion. Anything to get my durned projects hatched!
What projects, you ask? (as I stuff the rhetorical question into your mouth).Well, how about the newsletter that's been in the back of my mind forever and a week: the Northern Culture Monitor. Although cultural studies seems to be a hot fad these days, and a great many scribblers practition it like recycled, wafer-thin sociology, I don't notice that we are much wiser or our culture much richer. Maybe what we need is less boosterism and more satire? Yeah, that's the ticket.
And what would Megacrotchety write about? Hm. The Ronnie Hawkins review I couldn't sell. The obscenity case that is almost the reverse of the Sharpe case and sheds a nice sidelight on current (wacky) legal definitions,(unlike Sharpe too, it got almost zero media attention). A Globe and Mail rant against science in arts matters. The alleged anti-semitism of H. L. Mencken. The lavish reissues of the Lovin' Spoonful's old records. Shakespeare for healing Iraq. A possible anthology of newspaper columnists. Cultural policemen and their weapons.
But it's late. The kids must be tucked in and all that. Bye till next Tuesday.
PS: Anyone want to see a picture of my 2001 "Stalkwell" Hallowe'en costume? Anyone hereabouts have their own culture story they figger the media mangled, missed or over/underplayed? Anyone out there at all? Testing, testing. Testing for intellectual life... July 19, 2005
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