Intellectual Skywriting
Geltman, Max
"Intellectual Skywriting" EVERYTHING GOOD in the book is borrowed. The title was taken from Robert Heilbroner, the conclusion off the wall of a Dublin pub: "When sex is good it's the most beautiful thing in the world. But...
...To throw a theologic cu at them out of the Pauline seminary is show off, not to enlighten...
...Norman Podhoretz) told him that "Politics is the religion of the intellectuals," adding: "It's more than just radical chic...
...It's what makes his book fail substantially where it might have been useful, if not earth-shaking, had he been able to cope intelligently with the problem of the New York intellectual...
...Now 'lese super-rich non out of the Social egisler like to get their revolutionary rills vicariously...
...Elders...
...Max Geltman...
...Never mind the "convergence," but who is he...
...Nobile was given a .act that 'night have provided a focus forhis chronologically disjointed book...
...So enough, already...
...Nobile knows that) what's all this about "Zionist elders...
...was all so chic, :+o daring...
...Elders of Zion...
...Is something troubling our author...
...But when sex is bad, it's still pretty good...
...Nobile's designation...
...Nobile is uptight on the subject of Zionists and Jews...
...Nobile bogs down completely, however, is his incapacity to comprehend the literary politics of the men e women whom he is engaged in sooth and savaging...
...Why keep him hidden, and the reader in the dark...
...Nobile pads out other opinions to make a book, his original intention having been to write a magazine article...
...It's a dull, mostly boi fortnightly given over to the politic: the Left...
...The NYR is so thing special...
...It seems Mr...
...and how clever it vas for the editors to gobble up the powerful pre-publication Kirkus review service: if you want small chit-chat about the poli-lit higininks of the eastern intelligentsia, you'll probably get a kick out of the book...
...That's Mr...
...Even as bad taste this smells bad...
...August 24...
...967...
...one or two—certainly no more—have shown up two or three times in the last dozen years...
...The American upper-class WASP, the blueblood, has been radicalized for some time...
...So what's all the huffing and the puffing about...
...Literary Politics and the New York Review of Books By Philip Nobile Charterhouse $7.95 Zionists...
...What's the conspiracy the author is trying to expose...
...And when he is being himself he resorts to the unnamed source—in a book chockablock with names—so that the homemade revelations are lost to conjecture...
...Just becal the author is convinced that he can p out the "Jew-in-the-crowd" doesn't mm he can do it even if his intentions are meant...
...Nevertheless...
...Since there are no Zionists on the Review (and even Mr...
...This highfalutin grouping he refers to as an unbeatable "murderers' row...
...Well, barely three or four of the names appear with any frequency in the Review...
...Seems he had a falling out with Mr...
...If truth be told, t would have a hard time distinguishing tween a litotes and a leotard, a campa and a silo...
...The spec brand of Catholic hubris he threw at Irvings and Normans and Bobs and E baras—the Howes and Podhoretzes Epsteins and Silverses—by flaunting "hyperduliacs" at them is just not f What the hell are they supposed to kn about that...
...There is more of this, but I can't resist one more quote: "Silvers knew, says one Zionist elder of the Review, that...
...More...
...And while we are asking the questions, who is the "writer of middling renown [who] used to appear often in the Review...
...He was talking about illustra David Levine's physiognomy...
...only slightly suppressing a deressed chuckle when Andrew Kopkind (in le scone issue) told them that morality :as what came out of the barrel of a gun...
...Which is a pity...
...I would be a churl if I didn't sav a good word for a publication that gives unlimited space to book reviewers even if the hooks they are reviewing are often worth no more than a slight nod...
...Nobile•snorts, "[Podhoretz] and his Coin Gridlevs said we never smelled so good...
...The literary community has always been in love with the upper class, because they have a common enemythe bourgeoisie...
...Where Mr...
...up to and including the clads of how to make Molotov Locktails \,:ely York Het icu of Hooks...
...if you want to know how Wrong (Dennis) was wrong (he put the knee to the Review in Commentury in 1970 (and the Left right: if you want to hear what 'Truman lithped into the scholarly ears of the editors of Bolling Stone (something about the "Zionist Mafia...
...He hates the country more than the Black Muslims...
...But the author preferred to let that pass so he could indulge his own feeling of self-depression: "When the odor of repression was all around us," Mr...
...Not, it is true, the politics of organized or institutionalized Left, but academic Left...
...The editors have trot_ enough coping with simple gramma "Neither time nor space have been sr on books" is only one of their more elegant solecisms...
...I really would like to know who this "Zionist elder" was who told him "Silvers would be unhappy with Chomsky's [anti-Zionist] piece on Israel...
...So he seeks solace in namedropping, awed by Big Names, running them all together in one breathless sentence, thus: "Aiken ArendtGenovese HampshireHarding Kazin LaschLowellMorgenthauCruiseO'BrienRahv RosenWilliams, with spot duty from Berlin Borges Coles EllmanEllsbergMedawar Woodward...
...Midge Decter (Mrs...
...At the -same me it offered an opportunity to fill the ockets of his "stinking rich- backers...
...all so much f a "load of crap.- as Richard Rovere aid of I. U. Stone's politicking in this gregiously overwritten review of nonooks so far as the life of beautiful letters concerned...
...if you want to read a sampling of tievietv personals...
...And thereby hangs a tat Most of the Review's revenue der from university press advertising...
...Silvers and—poop—he was seen there no more...
...After they are not publishing a literary revi or even a book review...
...In between, Mr...
...or how closely Random House (and its subsidiaries) get favored Review treatment...
...Along the way Mr...
...some have shown up only once...
...But how could a boy brought up by the Pauline Fathers come to grips with the Yeshiva boys from the City Colleges of New York...
...W it was founded, during the newspa strike in 1963, the very clever Mr...
...Who is the "well-known New York cartoonist and writer who remarked...
...Never mind what he remarked, although I would not quarrel with what he said: "Bob Silvers [editor of the New York Review] is . .. the headwaiter of journalism...
...The person on the other end of the line [he is talking to the author on the telephone], a Jew and an academic, who moved Left after Kent State, while Podhoretz was passing him in the other direction, decided there was no convergence possible...
...Ro Benjamin Silvers thought to fill the uum provided by the absence of the f York Times'Book Review, which got little of the university loot because it iewed few college items...
Vol. 8 • November 1974 • No. 2
