Consumed over a cup of coffee, 800 words provide Dowd the ideal length to call her readers' attention to the ephemera at hand that may reveal larger trends and developments. But smart remarks are reductive and anti-ruminative; not only do they not encourage deeper analysis, they stymie it...Bloggers shouldn't be writing books either then, I suppose. But there is this urge to become a permanent object -- a permanent, saleable object.
When a few hundred pages' worth of these observations are published in one book, they suffer the opposite of synergy, adding up to less than the sum of their parts. Energizing in small morning doses, the author's fast-talking spins on the spin can rear-end one another until the pileup exhausts a reader's patience.
November 13, 2005
Too much Dowd: like too much coffee?
Kathryn Harrison reviews Maureen Dowd's "Are Men Necessary?"
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8 comments:
But I think a blogger (such as you?) could produce a very nice coffee table style book--short pieces, lots of images.
A universal human urge.
Incidentally, I think the muskies in Lake Harriet in the middle of Minneapolis are starting to get used to getting caught and released, like all muskies are anymore. It seems to be getting easier to catch them. I suppose one day they'll just stop fighting.
"But smart remarks are reductive and anti-ruminative; not only do they not encourage deeper analysis, they stymie it..."
But wait! That can't be true! That's the whole left approach to politics! Just hold on there a second!
"But smart remarks are reductive and anti-ruminative; not only do they not encourage deeper analysis, they stymie it...they suffer the opposite of synergy, adding up to less than the sum of their parts. Energizing in small morning doses, the author's fast-talking spins on the spin can rear-end one another until the pileup exhausts a reader's patience."
Sounds like the Democratic party of late, except the "smart" and "energizing" parts.
PJ O'Rourke, for example, can write about politics and be funny and substantive at the same time. With Dowd, it's like they keep saying lately: "There's no there there"
There's lots of talk on these here innernets about newspapers going the way of the dodo. The internet, as currently constituted, makes a poor newsgathering instrument. It takes a fairly large apparatus to assemble the news every day.
But blogs already make Dowd and her ilk superfluous. It's the op/ed page that's dead already, they just forgot to bury it. You can get opinion, firehose style, of a very high quality, from innumerable sources instantly. And it's exposed to the group intellect of the readers in a way that makes it much more difficult to be full of merde like the average Times Op/Ed writer. Dowd's the queen of the dodos. And I mean that every which way.
MoDo even made it into the NYT Crossword Puzzle today!
Dowd was the answer to the clue "sharp-penned Maureen."
What is it, anyway, is she the laughing stock, or is this some Rovian PR campaign for her book?
Beyonce: I didn't see a theme here of rejecting Dowd because she's a liberal. And in case you're just type-casting me as a conservative, I consider myself a stronger feminist than she is. She's trying to do the post-feminist thing.
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