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...
...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...
...Who is the "well-known New York cartoonist and writer who remarked...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...967...
...Max Geltman...
...So what's all the huffing and the puffing about...
...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...
...After they are not publishing a literary revi or even a book review...
...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...
...if you want to read a sampling of tievietv personals...
...If truth be told, t would have a hard time distinguishing tween a litotes and a leotard, a campa and a silo...
...Along the way Mr...
...Nobile•snorts, "[Podhoretz] and his Coin Gridlevs said we never smelled so good...
...was all so chic, :+o daring...
...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...
...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...
...At the -same me it offered an opportunity to fill the ockets of his "stinking rich- backers...
...Silvers and—poop—he was seen there no more...
...The NYR is so thing special...
...Where Mr...
...But when sex is bad, it's still pretty good...
...Nobile's designation...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Elders of Zion...
...Never mind the "convergence," but who is he...
...And while we are asking the questions, who is the "writer of middling renown [who] used to appear often in the Review...
...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...
...Seems he had a falling out with Mr...
...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...
...Since there are no Zionists on the Review (and even Mr...
...Elders...
...Well, barely three or four of the names appear with any frequency in the Review...
...Why keep him hidden, and the reader in the dark...
...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...
...Now 'lese super-rich non out of the Social egisler like to get their revolutionary rills vicariously...
...or how closely Random House (and its subsidiaries) get favored Review treatment...
...The literary community has always been in love with the upper class, because they have a common enemythe bourgeoisie...
...So enough, already...
...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...
...Nevertheless...
...August 24...
...Which is a pity...
...Norman Podhoretz) told him that "Politics is the religion of the intellectuals," adding: "It's more than just radical chic...
...Nobile is uptight on the subject of Zionists and Jews...
...Is something troubling our author...
...Nobile knows that) what's all this about "Zionist elders...
...This highfalutin grouping he refers to as an unbeatable "murderers' row...
...It seems Mr...
...That's Mr...
...Nobile was given a .act that 'night have provided a focus forhis chronologically disjointed book...
...The American upper-class WASP, the blueblood, has been radicalized for some time...
...He was talking about illustra David Levine's physiognomy...
...Midge Decter (Mrs...
...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...
...To throw a theologic cu at them out of the Pauline seminary is show off, not to enlighten...
...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...
...Even as bad taste this smells bad...
...It's a dull, mostly boi fortnightly given over to the politic: the Left...
...And thereby hangs a tat Most of the Review's revenue der from university press advertising...
...up to and including the clads of how to make Molotov Locktails \,:ely York Het icu of Hooks...
...Not, it is true, the politics of organized or institutionalized Left, but academic Left...
...More...
...There is more of this, but I can't resist one more quote: "Silvers knew, says one Zionist elder of the Review, that...
...Literary Politics and the New York Review of Books By Philip Nobile Charterhouse $7.95 Zionists...
...Nobile pads out other opinions to make a book, his original intention having been to write a magazine article...
...some have shown up only once...
...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...
...He hates the country more than the Black Muslims...
...one or two—certainly no more—have shown up two or three times in the last dozen years...
...W it was founded, during the newspa strike in 1963, the very clever Mr...
...What's the conspiracy the author is trying to expose...
...In between, Mr...
Vol. 8 • November 1974 • No. 2
