i don’t have a bachelor’s degree yet, either. should i regard this place as over my head?

1) I didn’t see anything especially Jewish in there.
2) Reading this stuff was a waste of time. Why did you even mention it?

Leaving you to carry on the real tradition of writing highly self-conscious in mode, with an unashamed vibration of bravura and display. Nervous, strewn with knotty or flashy phrases, impatient with transitions and other concessions to dullness, willfully calling attention to itself again and again and again.

“Hmm well I don’t think Scott was meaning to generalize about people who happen to be young, Jewish, and writers. Rather he was making a comment about this particular bunch of people”

Scott Mclemee wrote,

My generalization about the cultural condition of young Jewish writers was so willfully over-the-top that I figured the trope to be obvious, and it certainly will be so to any smart yJw’s who happen to read it.

Apparently, Chris, not only did Scott mean to generalize, but he meant to do so in a willfully over the top manner. To get it, you had to be smart and Jewish. Those of us who did not get it – which apparently includes you as well as me – can now reflect whether we are insufficiency Jewish or insufficiently smart (I hope its the former as far as I’m concerned).

Anyway, turns out Weiss took high school Latin, so I take it all back. He should be careful about figural language however. Referring to my display of “symposium bathroom break erudition” might be taken to imply that Movable Snipe is a urinal cake of wannabe hipsterism. And that would not be good.

Ha! That’s great. Well, they said they were going to carpet bomb us, and I guess that’s been about the level of competence and accuracy they’ve managed so far. Scott takes a single pop at them with the ack-ack gun and the result is that Weiss manages to crash his little plane all by himself.

It should be said that the rest of the site has some interesting stuff on it – but this purported attempt at blog criticism is bloody awful. One of the two people involved, Michael Weiss, has what he surely imagines to be a riposte posted today, which rather undermines itself by making sarcastic comments about the “professor” engaging in “symposium bathroom break pedantry,” Scott’s “lectern,” ” how “McLemee must have tenure already,” &c &c &c. It would have taken about 10 seconds Googling to discover that Scott has never held an academic position, and is rather an independent writer, critic, and recipient of the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian prize. This is surely the kind of intellectual laziness that annoyed Scott so much in the first place. I’ve seen Scott in reviewing mode – he takes a lot of time to write a several hundred word review b/c he takes care to do a lot of real research reading through the secondary literature on the subject of the review. He simply wouldn’t treat a topic that he was writing about with the sloppy incuriousness that these folks have displayed.

There’s some kind of phenomenon here, which is hard to describe, but which goes something like this:

In iteration 1 you have someone who is great at what they do and to and about whom identity issues are also very important. People talk about them as a great Jewish/Black/lesbian/Irish writer/film-maker/cook, whatever. Among other things, they are great at writing, making films or cooking.

In iteration 2 you get people writing blurbs for dust-jackets or other advertising copy who write apropos some moderately talented person from the same group that they are “the next Philip Roth” or “the next Spike Lee” or whatever.

In iteration 3 (or n) you get real mediocrities who try to promote themselves as creative-person-with-identity-X. The kindest thing you can then say is “nice try”.

I mean, I had to read it a couple times because there’s something weirdly incoherent about the man’s prose style, but once I got with it—the ultimate endorsement of pleonasm—I laughed. He’s a cynic. So the Saudis make nice with us, so what? It’s only a gesture. Or: they’re just getting in bed with the winning side. Or: they’re getting in bed with the lesser evil. We’re doing good! We suck. You get the feeling he thinks we suck. And he’s right. Especially now that Bush wants to bleed even more money from the arts, ostensibly to fund his New War. Because when I need money, the first place I turn is the arts. Jeeze. Does anyone read anymore? I’m serious.

It has the distinct feel of high school kids playing educated social critics, wielding a thesaurus. Still, I don’t think one would have to look far to find much better young Jewish writers. So I’m pretty sure the generalization at the end of this post isn’t warranted. In fact, the generalization seems oddly… well, I’ll put it this way: it makes me a bit uncomfortable.