Current Wisdom
Jackasses, Assorted
CURRENT WISDOM Chicago Tribune How The American Spectator and National Review ruined the reputation of John Updike and set the Feminist Terror upon him, as reported by Ms. Garry Wills: On the...
...Our glances met during that first meeting and held for a moment too long...
...Even some who praised the novel—in New York magazine and TLS—admitted the narrative voice is as misogynist as the character being described...
...Today is her second birthday and she has made me see fresh this two-tiered world, a world that, despite all our nonsense about feminism, continues to offer less respect and less opportunity for women than it does for men...
...The problem continues to be that it was one race, one class, one gender...
...According to that view, the white, middle-class, heterosexual, nuclear family with its attendant division of labor according to sexual stereotype has always existed—the Flintstones—and always will exist—the Jetsons...
...My kids are grown, so I have a degree of freedom...
...This curriculum teaches what I call the Flintstones-Jetsons view of history...
...John Barton strikes another blow for the improbable, the fantastic, and the just plain wrong: I remember my surprise when a student of mine wrote a paper about the book of Job, and referred to the author throughout as "he or she...
...Little by little, in the 20 years between my eighteenth birthday and her second one, I learned how to live in the world...
...only women have a gender...
...But look at who I am...
...I add yet another element by kissing my left shoulder, then my right, with arms angled out from my sides...
...November 10, 1990] Nation A curious outburst from Christabel Hitchens, occasioned by his avid perusal of the greatest presidential memoir in the history of the world: These pathetic, self-aggrandizing and self-pitying lies, taken at random from An American Life: The Autobiography, are no disgrace to the ex-President who "uttered" them...
...The book he has "written" is a digest and concoction of easily detectible and contemptible falsehoods...
...The truly disgraceful paragraph in the book comes not in the main text but in the acknowledgments: Robert Lindsey, a talented writer, was with me every step of the way...
...Contrary to what the right wing would have us believe, race, class, and gender have always been in the curriculum...
...Because by definition what is important was done by privileged white males and what was done by privileged white males was important...
...Geer later married...
...The wonderful and thoroughly professional team at Simon and Schuster, under the able leadership of CEO Dick Snyder, were there day and night...
...September 24, 1990] New York Daily News New Age culture note for those steatopygic TV devotees capable of remembering all the way back to the glorious days of Waltonian Madness: On the hit TV series "The Waltons," he was the ultimate, all-American grandfather...
...Were women literate...
...Paula Rothenberg Delivered at the College of Wooster The celebrated authoress of Racism and Sexism: An Integrated Study, demonstrates why Johnny can't read and is probably better off: I think it is perfectly legitimate to study the ideas and the experience of privileged white European males...
...My throat went dry, and I knew I'd made a connection," recounts Hay in a new biography, The Trouble With Harty: Founder of the Modern Gay Movement (Alyson Publications...
...No wonder right-wing journals such as The American Spectator and National Review called Rabbit at Rest Updike's masterpiece...
...But I realized that I had simply assumed the author was male, without examining the reasons...
...Do the above-named really choose to be implicated...
...Life goes on...
...When you arrive the albatrosses should line up, rock forward on their feet, and bow...
...October 17, 1990] New York Review of Books Whilst reviewing still more facetiae from the mind of Harold Bloom, a Prof...
...stage where Geer, 30, and Hay, 21, did a play together...
...I do not know what passersby make of this scene, but fishermen on small volcanic islands in the Pacific are surely used to all sorts of strange birds...
...My friends and I have learned to live with it, but my little girl deserves better...
...I had him first," Hay blurted...
...But in the early years, before he donned those overalls, Grandpa Walton Will Geer was a committed, political leftie who had a homosexual affair with Harry Hay, today considered the granddaddy of gay activists...
...The sexual harassment stories...
...The snobbishness is Updike's, who resembles William Buckley and Tom Wolfe in the glorification of greed and violence as a form of patriotism...
...The fact that women were now making 67 cents for every dollar that a man makes—well it was better than 1970, wasn't it, when we were making only 59 cents...
...To that the mother of Geer's three children retorted, "I had him longest...
...Or at least that is what I like to think...
...Where's your sense of humor...
...Probably not...
...The demeaning comments...
...It began in 1933 on a Sunset Blvd...
...Snyder, Korda, Mayhew and the rest are people of consequence in the publishing industry...
...Author Stuart Timmons says Geer introduced Hay to Hollywood's political left and the Communist party before their romance faded...
...November 22, 1990] Orange County Register One of the world's greatest newspapers captures the essence of Mrs...
...It will not do to say that Rabbit the wife-beater is just expressing his own misogyny, not Updike's...
...Hiroshi, picking up another part of the courting dance, arches his chest out and his arms back...
...August 31, 1990] New Yorker Proof that this venerable magazine of toney prose is not always anti-American, at least not when it is divinely risible: "You've been there more than anyone else on earth, anyone in history," Peter says, letting his binoculars drop to his chest...
...My question is this: Why are none of the above bringing suit against Reagan for defamation...
...That belongs in college...
...And Mort Janklow, my literary agent...
...Carol Fennelly, disheveled femme fatale of the deceased nuisance Mitch Snyder, as Mrs...
...But also—and this may be even more important —we check on ourselves...
...only lesbians and gays have a sexual orientation...
...And you've been such a good protector of the birds...
...Editor in chief Michael Korda patiently read every word time and time again, dotted every i and crossed every r—no one could ask for a better editor...
...I'm what they call a strong woman...
...Maybe someday, years from now, my daughter will come home and say, "Mother, at college my professor acted as if my studies were an amusing hobby and at work the man who runs my department puts his hand on my leg and to compete with the man who's in the running for my promotion who makes more than I do I can't take time to have a relationship but he has a wife and two children and I'm smarter and it doesn't make any difference and some guy tried to jump me after our date last night...
...Some, perhaps...
...And so I'm having to deal with the very real possibility that I'll have to live the rest of my life as a single woman...
...Yeah, yeah...
...Charlie Hayward, Alice Mayhew, and Jack McKeown were also of invaluable assistance...
...Everyone else is a human being...
...According to this curriculum, neither women nor working people nor peoples of color have ever done anything important...
...How can they make themselves accomplices to a fraud...
...It cannot be helped, with Ronald Wilson Reagan, that every word he says is a lie, including the words "and" and "but...
...The rape cases...
...October 24, 1990]A Speech by Dr...
...He rocks onto his toes, angles his arms out to his sides, and makes a stooping half bow...
...November 13, 1990] THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1991 51...
...By arguing that a singularly important section of the Hebrew Bible may have been written by a woman, Harold Bloom enlarges our ideas about ancient Hebrew literature...
...How many men are going to put up with a woman who goes to jail and dies for what she believes in...
...The problem is when you universalize that experience and treat it as if it were all there were...
...November 22, 1990]New York Times John Russell, art critic of the neoFreudian Times, makes the case for getting soundly stewed every time one visits the Republic's great art museums: Every time we pay a call on those permanent collections, we check on the art...
...But was every book in the Bible written by a professional scribe...
...But until now, no critic known to me has argued that any substantial part of the Bible had a woman as its author...
...The constant stories about the underrepresentation of women, on the tenure track, in the film industry, in government, everywhere, had become commonplace...
...Perhaps such evenhandedness is now standard in North America, but it certainly isn't in Oxford...
...She is something like me, only better...
...According to this curriculum, only people of color have a race...
...The novelist Mary Gordon faces this issue squarely in a book of essays that will appear next spring, where she says the problem of misogyny must enter into a judgment of Updike as fully as the problem of anti-Semitism enters into ones response to Ezra Pound...
...If the art looks just the same as it did the last time round, there's something wrong with us...
...No...
...None of them, as far as I know, have any difficulty paying the rent or taking a vacation...
...And the castaneting and whinnying we three do next probably doesn't surprise them much, either...
...Non-religious feminist critics became angry at the patriarchal attitudes in much of the Bible, while Jewish and Christian feminists often argue that, within the assumptions of an admittedly patriarchal society, the Bible scores quite highly for its treatment of women...
...She has given me my anger back, and I intend to use it well...
...Fennelly laments the lack of necrophiliacs among her male cohorts: "Forty-one isn't ancient, realize," she said recently, "but at the same time it's not twenty either...
...However, Hay still managed to snipe at Geer's wife, Herta Ware, when the actor died in 1974...
...Garry Wills: On the subject of snobbery, I did not object to Rabbit's social standing but to Updike'sthat of the reactionary dandy trying to disguise an aesthete's cult of violence by using a working man as his stalking horse...
...And all of them were heterosexual...
...Professional scribes in the ancient world were men: so much we know or think we do...
...November 26, 1990]New York Times Beginning with an extraordinarily dubious statement even by her standards, Miss Anna Quindlen, poet, philosopher, professional womanist, and Times columnist, indulges the feminist fevers for an entire column unrelieved even by an arf-arf, but quite properly concluded in hate: My daughter is two years old today...
Vol. 24 • January 1991 • No. 1
