Correspondence
tional anthem, defected to Spain. President Ronald Reagan and his wife had their last medical check-up at Bethesda Naval Hospital. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, the joke was on the local police. There they...
...If Mr...
...Stan Sousa North Bellmore, New York I commend Mr...
...Varnado, and Paul C. Vitz...
...It's a free-standing, self-contained terrible story...
...WE Mi SPECIAL DISCOUNT RATES FOR FIRST-TIME SUBSCRIBERS mei I I ^ Two-year subscription .....$23 (regularly $35) I I NAME (Please print or type) STREET ADDRESS PAYMENT MUST ACCOMPANY ORDER L CITY STATE ZIP CODE...
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...The only way a story about someThere is a tenacious myth in America that says Catholics are stupid, ignorant, and superstitious...
...i.e., the complete absence of growth in the environs around Inner Harbor (just walk east or west on Baltimore Street from Inner Harbor), the profusion of sports bars and nightclubs at the expense of commercial growth (the Brokerage is broke, Charles Street is struggling, while the Power Plant boasts of being the biggest nightclub in the East and the old Fish Market becomes a new entertainment complex...
...Even one lucky enough to have such a dynamic job as a "writer for Barron's" may sometimes need to be reminded of his own spiritual apathy, of the common suffering that connects us all...
...These are the "right kind of people," Mr...
...Queenan is still unsatisfied, he can find his favorite characters living their oh-so successful Are Catholics STUPID ? (Please allow 2 to 8 weeks for delivery of first issue...
...Perhaps Mr...
...Maynes, of course, felt no such obligation to his readers...
...They grieve...
...They emerge in his book as caricatures combining the least attractive aspects of the automaton and the barbarian: unthinking, uncultured, incurious beings, shallow and promiscuous, their brains benumbed by rock music and TV...
...Well, the NEW OXFORD REVIEW has arrived on the scene to dispel those falsehoods...
...Conservatives, in their relentless quest fora return to traditional values, also recognize this danger, or why go on as they do about moral decay...
...Kudos I always suspected that Jimmy Carter was a small man, a sort of wart on the end of the nose of born-again Christianity...
...TE.D...
...Johannes Stuttgen, had sought $29,000 until confronted by Hun thrift...
...his book suggests, rather, that he despises them...
...I have forgotten them already...
...Make check payable to NEW OXFORD REVIEW...
...That revelation will make him human, make We The People care about him...
...The National Catholic Register has said that "for sheer feistiness and guts, it's hard to top the NEW OXFORD REVIEW...
...Thanks to Tom Bethell for a fine piece ("Operation Rescue," TAS, December 1988)—and to God for not leaving us without a remnant...
...Christmas was celebrated with the usual threats to public nativity scenes by the American Civil Liberties Union and arrests of sex-crazed Santa Clauses...
...Based on his article "Character Assassins" (TAS, December 1988), he strongly prefers that characters in American fiction be equally fortunate...
...We're not reading stories about job descriptions, but stories that speak to the danger looming behind displaced, beaten, or forgotten values...
...I don't see the connection with Beattie, Inc...
...One day I told him, "Ed, your wife's abortion isn't your Vietnam...
...If Mr...
...The idea that a crummy job is a "metaphor for some greater spiritual emptiness" reminds me of a friend who kept referring to his wife's abortion as "my Vietnam...
...That's one of the reasons I live in the suburbs...
...Or maybe Mr...
...They work...
...Feel-good tales about "knights and knaves" are born of an unconstrained vision and are better left to the escapist cartoons Hollywood produces...
...Help us explode old myths and prejudices...
...What Mr...
...I've seen them, and the question is: Who cares...
...On one point, in particular, he left me unconvinced...
...It had the taste of molasses and coarse grains...
...I wonder if you would now mind compiling a reading list...
...It's heavy bread but rich...
...Yasser Arafat stupefied many and aroused the suspicions of others when on December 14 he seemed to renounce terrorism and recognize the state of Israel...
...The "morbid charm" Mr...
...Not My Department Your scatological pooh-poohing of the Consumer Product Safety Commission ("The Continuing Crisis," TAS, December 1988) was gracefully received...
...It is a sign of these "smooth times," to borrow a phrase from Amos, that a business writer would vilify his country's short story writers for concentrating on suffering "weirdos...
...The repellent mess, titled "Corner of Fat," was dropped by a cleaning crew at Dusseldorf s Academy of Art in 1986...
...Doherty is certainly not alone) who arrive in "$40,000" cars is easier than seeing the rot under the glitz...
...Martyred PTL holyman Jim Bakker manifested signs of repentance, returning to the pulpit and offering to "get a gun and blow my head off" if it would help Christianity...
...What's worse, those engineers, physicists, systems analysts, and investment bankers he so sorely wants to read about can just as easily be losers, drunks, wackos, addicts, or creeps...
...Even the "magisterial" New York Times has had to take notice...
...Queenan on his timely and important article, "Character Assassins...
...continued on page 45) THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1989 9 they are the kinds of characters that hit readers where they live—the gut, the heart...
...And Oman has banned Western pop music...
...Harry Williams Washington, D.C...
...Unblessed with corporate savvy, Carver's characters do not blame the infrastructure or the White House...
...And that they try to endure while resigned to being financial/social have-nots is both a noble and conservative notion...
...If Queen-an thinks the characters of today's short story writers are "boring, condescending, and monotonous," primarily because they're jobless and haven't yet met "the right kind of people," I wonder what kind of power fiction he would suggest, or why he doesn't just watch "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous...
...They listened to him...
...Here I've been reading short stories, novels, and poems all these years for their literary merit alone...
...However, because the man was inconvenienced by a hamburger, he would not fall within our jurisdiction...
...Chard deNiord Washington, Connecticut Mr...
...To think of the time and emotional energy I've wasted in relating humanly to fictional characters, experiencing their catharses, appreciating the drama inherent in their suffering...
...Dannhauser's only defense is to point out that The Closing of the American Mind is dedicated to these very students—so it is, and so what?—and to assert, without support, that "an easily demonstrable love of the latter suffuses its pages...
...But Baltimore—and I'm speaking of Baltimore City—has a lot to answer for itself, I'm afraid, for the way the city has changed...
...Queenan attempts to spread a tendentious tyranny of confusing the democracy of art with the business of politics and patriotism...
...Both men strike me as, if you'll forgive the suggestion, much too good for The American Spectator...
...Besides, this is a Sammy Davis Juniorism and does not belong in a serious letter to the editor...
...Baltimore can turn itself around, but the political scene will have to change before it does...
...Chard deNiord admits to having a Master of Fine Arts in poetry, yet I detect no signs of remorse in his/her/ Chard's letter...
...dealt with these types because one "who ran the IBM System 360" will be of any significance to the majority of readers is if this bundle of excitement realizes that a career with computers does not a spiritual life make...
...But when one looks at the political scene in Baltimore City and sees the one-dimensional machine at work, or better, not at work (as in most troubled American cities), a machine that gives us such senators-for-life as Sarbanes and Mikulski, a machine that refuses to lower the highest property tax rate in the state and thus stimulate growth, a machine that has virtually driven business out of the city for the promotion of charm and tourism, then I can see why Baltimore City is such an easy mark for the satire of John Waters, and why Divine himself said, when asked about his success, "It gave me the chance to get out of Baltimore," or words to that effect...
...Queenan concedes in Carver is actually the attempt by Carver's characters to salvage some bit of hope, value, in the world despite the fact that they are not (to the puzzlement of Mr...
...Ignatius did not regard the Parry and Kornbluh article as "wacko...
...National Review calls us "first-rate" and Newsweek has conceded that we are "thoughtful," even praising our "childlike exuberance...
...What an attitude...
...Westcott, people who live in New Haven, Ct., and who think you should sit around eating brown bread the day after your kid dies, should be very careful about how they use the words "tragic" and "stupid...
...Our contributors include the best orthodox Catholicism has to offer: Francis Canavan S.J., Christopher Derrick, Joseph Fessio S.J., George A. Kelly, James Likoudis, Ralph Mclnerny, John T. Noonan Jr., Kevin Perrotta, James J. Thompson Jr., S.L...
...That is why the NEW OXFORD REVIEW has made its appearance...
...I have never been hit where I live...
...Michael Ledeen replies: Mr...
...Indeed, he reprinted major sections of the piece in the September 4, 1988, issue of the Washington Post...
...In Crawfordsville, Indiana, Mr...
...Queen-an would like to talk investments over drinks with The Misfit...
...May your sharp wit continue to grace these pages with more American caveats against the dreck of subversive crapehangers...
...Some things are bad all by themselves...
...Its owner, Mr...
...To judge fiction primarily on the basis of its characters' economic and professional status is an offense to anyone's healthy imagination...
...Maynes, whose rumor-ridden publication is now the National Enquirer of foreign policy magazines, misses the point...
...lowered the boom on the effete literary establishment of this country magazine that can speak with the same authority and "weight" as a Commonweal or a Commentary...
...And their conditions may indeed signify an aspect of our own lives that needs re-evaluation...
...After all, it's said, there aren't even enough intelligent orthodox Catholics to support a decent journal of opinion...
...Queenan...
...Queenan, for at last providing a clear profile of "the right kind of people...
...They smelled it, then he had them taste it...
...As this column heads for the printer, the speculation mounts that some of Mr...
...Donald Strong, the Santa at the Boulevard Mall, was arrested as a common frotteur for fondling women between the ages of fifteen and eighteen, the oldest of whom were having trouble enough maintaining their faith in the merry old soul...
...They swallowed the dark bread...
...There they besieged the wrong house after being called in to save a woman from an armed assailant...
...But Outlook editor David Ignatius made sure that his readers received, in considerable detail, a thorough debunking of the lunatic accusations...
...It's about time a writer for Barron's...
...In other words, a terrible Leonard Michaels story isn't a metaphor for a terrible Grace Paley story...
...Joseph Rodota's "Eminento" to our littlest ex-President (TAS, December 1988) has not only justified my suspicion but enlarged the wart...
...Yours in Public Service, —Terrence Scanlon, Chairman Consumer Product Safety Commission Washington, D.C...
...Bloom professes to pity them...
...He might suggest they wear shoes and dispose of that rotting corpse, lest they soil his pristine floors...
...And after reading Wise Blood, how could Mr...
...Irene Prater Dell Carl Junction, Missouri It all really comes down to this: if a nation doesn't want its laws despised, it has to take at least some trouble to see that they aren't despicable...
...Orthodox Catholics have newspapers, quarterly journals, family magazines, and clergy magazines, but they have no "literary" I I I I I I I I I I I lives in Wang commercials...
...Klein New York, New York Maynes' Point In your December 1988 issue Michael Ledeen [in "Presswatch"] excoriates Foreign Policy for printing an article by Robert Parry and Peter Kornbluh, who report on a propaganda and disinformation campaign run out of the National Security Council during the Reagan Administration...
...Charles William Maynes Editor, Foreign Policy Washington, D.C...
...I find no place in the stories of Raymond Carver in which unemloyment or drinking is glorified or celebrated...
...Not all people are human, and those who aren't are definitely the wrong kind...
...What does fiction have to do anyway with his concern that only "losers, drunks, wackos, addicts, failures, creeps, loners, schlemiels, and people who don't get tenure" will characterize this age...
...it's her abortion...
...In Dusseldorf, West Germany, a philistine judge has refused to rule that a five-pound lump of rancid butter constitutes art...
...Thank you, Mr...
...Queenan is having the hard-working Bundren family out to the house this weekend for finger sandwiches...
...They are bare-boned predicaments with oftentimes harsh consequences...
...Sorry, but it ain't so, Joe...
...Did it really take Mr...
...Arafat's former colleagues were responsible for that bomb and decent impulse urges that justice be done...
...Queenan displays a tragic contemporary ignorance—or is it stupidity—for the fact that characters, not faceless professionals, populate good fiction...
...Serious writers are doing with fiction what conservatives are doing with lecterns and editorials: What's happened to human values...
...Who knows, Mayor Kurt Schmoke may meet the challenge yet...
...Sousa: Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor were hilarious rustics who wrote about other hilarious rustics...
...C H. Ross Nashville, Tennessee 46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1989...
...US$17 (regularly $22) Payment must be drawn in US Dollars ^ One-year student, unemployed, or retired person's subscription $12 (regularly $16) ^ Sample copy $3.50 Send coupon or letter...
...Will they ever be recovered...
...Lexington Market is halfway there as it shifts from selling "most of the parts of a pig" to fast food that disappears quicker, especially to the weekend rhythms of city-sponsored musicians), the blight of public housing downtown, arch symbol of that absence of growth, and symbol, as well, of that housing's absence in Roland Park, where Jonathan Yardley lives, and in Ruxton, where such caring people as Reg Murphy and Kathleen Townsend live, and, yes, a pit stop, as one sportswriter indecorously put it a while back, a place to get a beer and a crab-cake on the way to New York...
...In the same article Ledeen praises the editor of the Washington Post Outlook section, David Ignatius, for debunking such "wacko stories...
...I now know there is at Iowa, where I happened to spend a few years in the MFA program as a poet—I always did wonder about those weirdos out there writing all the time—but what about my high school and college teachers who never said one word about those real "losers" in Dostoevsky, Dante, Dickens, and Hawthorne, to name just a few...
...Terry Eastland becomes TAS's Presswatch columnist, and Mr...
...Berkeley, CA 94706 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1989 45 and pumped a little fresh air into the fetid world of contemporary fiction...
...The assailant (who was in the house next door) tried repeatedly to surrender only to be ordered away by the officious cops who suspected him of being a nosy neighbor...
...As for Mr...
...I found it effusive to the point of smarminess, marred as it was by too many coy references to the author's friendship with Bloom and by his curious penchant for self-congratulation (" . . . brilliantly exposed in letters to the Chronicle by Werner J. Dannhauser and Arthur Kruger...
...They talked on into the early morning, the high, pale cast of light in the windows, and they did not think of leaving...
...Mail to: NEW OXFORD REVIEW Room 27 1069 Kains Ave...
...It was Washington money (UDAG grants), after all, that kept the Inner Harbor from going under...
...Not everything bad can be a metaphor for something else...
...They love...
...Sure, the Outlook section of the Post ran bits and pieces of the hogwash that Maynes published, allegingfalsely—that the NSC and the State Department were engaged in "propaganda and disinformation...
...And that's the difference between honorable journalism and the sort of garbage found all too often in Foreign Policy nowadays...
...There's more going on than the gritty details of American life depicted on "The Cosby Show...
...Queenan not consider making a career move to preaching...
...Michael Ledeen returns to our foreign desk...
...Had America discharged that duty, Operation Rescue would not have been necessary...
...Like any good welfare recipient, Baltimore knows how to bite the hand that feeds it, and blaming outsiders (Mr...
...The liberal Protestants have their Christian Century, the Evangelicals have their Christianity Today, the liberal Catholics have their Commonweal, and the Jews have their Commentary...
...Born in 1977 and published 10 times a year, we've already made a mark...
...They ate what they could...
...Jim Westcott New Haven, Connecticut Joe Queenan replies Mr...
...Without Washington's help, let us hope...
...Granted that Dannhauser's space may have been limited, I'd be grateful for some evidence of this "easily demonstrable love" where I, and so many others, have found only sourness and hostility...
...it's much more personal than that...
...But I wonder what's so mediocre about the following passage from Carver about a middle-class mother and father receiving solace from a baker the day after their young son has died accidentally: "Smell this," the baker said, breaking open a dark loaf...
...Queenan only two weeks to do a vocational survey of all the characters in Beattie, Carver, Paley, and Michaels...
...Queenan) "go-getters...
...The fact is that American fiction has, since its beginnings (what did Young Goodman Brown do for income...
...TAS, October 1988)—the high point of the issue, and Bruce Bawer demonstrated, once again, that he's the soundest and most readable critic in the land...
...Better not give him a bogus stock tip...
...Blaming Baltimore Carroll Doherty laments the loss of Barry Levinson's "Bawlamer" (and who doesn't...
...Then on December 21, 259 people perished on Pan Am Flight 103 when it was blown up by a bomb over Lockerbie, Scotland...
...And how about that future executive Quentin Compson and his downright good taste to have chosen the Charles River in which to drown himself...
...CORRESPONDENCE (continued from page 9) As someone who at least takes the time to read, Mr...
...My suspicion is that Queenan knows that good fiction is more enduring than good history and that if some talented author doesn't lionize the exploits of the eighties elite quickly, their "wholesome" romance will be lost...
...But Professor Werner Dannhauser's defense of Allan Bloom was a disappointment ("Allan Bloom and the Critics...
...1111•111•=1=1111111111111M111•111111.1•11MINIIIIRIMIIN =NEM Mani =11111111111111111•1•111=1•1111=11=1111•1=11=111•1111MMII MN MN NM 1111 ^ One-year subscription...
...It never occurs to Queenan that the destitute protagonists in the stories of Carver, Ford, Oates, Ozick, Wolff, and Atwood—not to mention the Iowa misfits—are more interesting to their authors than copacetic breadwinners...
...Queenan puts a character's occupation at the top of his literary checklist, let's take a quick look at two American masters typically lionized by the right: Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner...
...Perhaps you should spend another few weeks doing a humanity profile in the stories of the authors you've mentioned...
...seemingly at the expense of federal encroachment from the South, the Washington yuppies, and Edward Bennett Williams ("The WashBalt Syndrome," TAS, November 1988...
...I have forwarded the complaint to the Food and Drug Administration...
...You see, we believe that orthodox Catholics need a high-grade magazine that really speaks to the mind as well as the heart, that speaks Truth with clarity, verve, and style...
...14 (regularly $19) ^ One-year Canadian or foreign subscription...
...I'm among those readers who, like the reviewer in the New Republic, were put off by Bloom's uncharitable—nay, venomous—portrait of his students...
...RET CORRESPONDENCE October's Horror Show Andrew Ferguson's memoir of New Orleans was a hoot ("Wanna Party...
...Is there some conspiracy going on in American schools...
...With this issue, Mr...
...Moreover, there is a prejudice among modernist Catholics that those Catholics who really believe in the Bible, the creeds, tradition, and the Church are intellectually feeble...
...Ledeen fails to report to your readers is that Mr...
...It was like daylight under the fluorescent trays of light...
...But orthodox Catholics have nothing comparable in the field...
...Queenan should know, at minimum, that a character's unemployment, social status, failure, or loneliness serves most often as metaphor for some greater spiritual emptiness...
...Queenan Assassins Apparently, Joe Queenan is successful, financially and otherwise...
...Why wasn't I ever taught that all I needed to do in order to judge good fiction was to take a simple job profile of an author's characters...
...I have read all of Louis Auchincloss and Ayn Rand and find Bret Easton Ellis, Jay McInerney, and Tom Wolfe exciting, but not quite savvy enough...
...The above-mentioned magazines are distinguished and influential trend-setters, and the time has come to give them some serious competition...
...Why, I had the pleasure, even, of having a local pol (UDAG funded) ask me if I knew any rich Washingtonians who might want to invest in housing there as a tax write-off...
Vol. 22 • February 1989 • No. 2
