Althouse: The perfect response to Joyce Carol Oates.

November 23, 2015

The perfect response to Joyce Carol Oates.

.@JoyceCarolOates you were great in 'The Shining' https://t.co/yeE4z7TW04
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) November 23, 2015

24 comments:

Grackle said...: I strongly recommend that she personally visit Syria and report back to us on the joy there.

F.G.; 11/23/15, 7:59 AM
mezzrow said...: The Hawk is giddy and full of football success. Still, some of his best work there.

The bar is high.; 11/23/15, 8:14 AM
Temujin said...: I am often bewildered by the random or open thoughts of writers. I always like their works better when I don't actually hear or read interviews with them. Let me think of them as I will, not as they are. For any other profession it doesn't bother or surprise me. But listening or reading interviews with authors often, not always, but often wrecks the experience for me.

That may just be me.; 11/23/15, 8:17 AM
JAORE said...: Another name I recommend people put on their political "ignore" list.; 11/23/15, 8:19 AM
Ignorance is Bliss said...: They seem pretty joyous when they get to behead someone. Does that count?

In fact, when they released the last beheading video I remember thousands and thousands of people dancing in the streets in North Jersey.; 11/23/15, 8:24 AM
BxBomber said...: Iowahawk is one of the more original and inspired bloggers/twitterers. And that lady does look like Shelly Duvall. Maybe she is just saying nice things about ISIS because she doesnt want to be chased around the hotel by a deranged guy with an ax.; 11/23/15, 8:32 AM
Tibore said...: Are people reading her right? She had another tweet that went:
"Portrayal of non-combative life under ISIS so grim & narrow, why would anyone wish to live in such a way? Mass delusion?"

I see her first tweet as rhetorical framing of a statement that there are indeed no "joyful portrayals" of life under ISIS. Not that she was naively wondering where they all were.; 11/23/15, 8:37 AM
Sebastian said...: Decided long ago not to read another word by JCO. I'm sorry this came without a trigger warning.

But surely The Shining was more joyous than ISIS?; 11/23/15, 8:39 AM
Steve M. Galbraith said...: All work and no play makes ISIS do bad things.; 11/23/15, 8:46 AM
Tibore said...: Well... as context, her Twitter timeline does have some retarded statements:

"Maybe if Muslims in US promise to purchase firearms & join NRA, white Christian America will more welcome them? Just an idea."

""boots on the ground" exudes a quasi-mythic significance more evocative than "bodies on the ground" or (even) "ghost riders in the sky""

"Recall that Mother Courage, weapons-monger, lost all her children."

I still think that, given her second tweet, her original one wasn't some sort of statement that we're supposedly missing something in the medial's portrayal of ISIS. That said, I can't blame Iowahawk for ripping her. When the totality of her timeline is taken into account, it's easier to believe she really is that dumb.; 11/23/15, 8:51 AM
dbp said...: Iowahawk has been on a JCO rampage this morning...

@JoyceCarolOates your sex life sounds amazing

Joyce Carol Oates @JoyceCarolOates
Husband has just called out excitedly--"Rebecca Goldstein's review in Sunday N Y Times Book Review is excellent--best thing in the issue."; 11/23/15, 9:00 AM
lgv said...: She poses real questions, but the answers are so easy I conclude they were rhetorical.

What? She wasn't being rhetorical? OK. NO and YES.; 11/23/15, 9:02 AM
Anonymous said...: Temujin: I always like their works better when I don't actually hear or read interviews with them. Let me think of them as I will, not as they are.

Writers are like actors (if slightly smarter) - they can be wonderfully talented artists who astonish us with their stupidity and ignorance whenever they step outside their art, an effect exacerbated by the fact that artists tend to have out-sized egos.; 11/23/15, 9:36 AM
Rusty said...: Temujin said...
I am often bewildered by the random or open thoughts of writers. I always like their works better when I don't actually hear or read interviews with them. Let me think of them as I will, not as they are. For any other profession it doesn't bother or surprise me. But listening or reading interviews with authors often, not always, but often wrecks the experience for me.

That may just be me.

Reading Thomas Pynchon was more enjoyable before he started writing for Rolling Stone or whatever.
Vineland sucked.; 11/23/15, 10:55 AM
Bushman of the Kohlrabi said...: This was my favorite Hawk teet:

the last time someone seriously discussed @JoyceCarolOates was at a fondue party in Iowa City in 1974.; 11/23/15, 11:08 AM
CWJ said...: Anglelyne wrote -

"Writers are like actors (if slightly smarter) - they can be wonderfully talented artists who astonish us with their stupidity and ignorance whenever they step outside their art, an effect exacerbated by the fact that artists tend to have out-sized egos."

In my experience, that observation applies to individuals in quite a few professions, judges in particular.; 11/23/15, 11:22 AM
MaxedOutMama said...: I did see a lot of people apparently cheering an ISIS "morality" execution. That's the last and only one I ever watched.

I really, really do not know what to say to Oates, or about her.

People cheered the auto-da-fes of the inquisition. This is one of the things that people do.; 11/23/15, 12:08 PM
Jupiter said...: JCO did write "Black Water".; 11/23/15, 3:00 PM
the gold digger said...: "Writers are like actors (if slightly smarter) - they can be wonderfully talented artists who astonish us with their stupidity and ignorance whenever they step outside their art, an effect exacerbated by the fact that artists tend to have out-sized egos."

A college friend writes international best sellers. My husband asked him (he is a mutual friend) for a campaign donation when husband was running for public office. Writer friend regretfully turned husband down, saying he cannot afford to make public statements about his political beliefs.

He gets it.; 11/23/15, 4:10 PM
whitney said...: I can't believe I used to read her books. It makes me feel a little better that I never enjoyed them; 11/23/15, 4:56 PM
Jason said...: I used to ride the elevator every day with T. Coraghessian Boyle.

Bullshit. Everybody who knows him calls him "Tom."

Writers become insufferable because once they get published they're surrounded by fawning sycophants sucking up to them and telling them how brilliant they are and they're really not, most of the time. JCO is obviously a dingbat. There are tons of them in academia and literary culture.

Crap, look at Marion Zimmer Bradley and her odious multiple child rapist husband and NAMBLA charter member Walter Breen. Walter would fondle toddlers openly at cocktail parties in the libtard literary sci fi circuit and not even that was enough to cause the literati to put his head on a pike. Marion Zimmer Bradley, the lesbian leftard author of the Mists of Avalon series, let it happen, out in the open. Didn't give a rat's ass. No problem for the left-tards. Surrounded by mewling sycophants singing her praises until she died. Folk hero among the lesbians.

These people never get a reality check.

Oh, and a conservative would never win a book award of note. The cretins at the Hugo awards pretty much nuked the award rather than see it go to a non-libtard writer.; 11/23/15, 5:39 PM
mikee said...: There are reasons publishing houses have editors, and JCO's recent tweet is one of them.; 11/23/15, 6:09 PM
Melissa said...: @Tibore

What you said.

It may have been a rhetorical question, and perhaps naove, but it seems like a reasonable question to me. Is it not bizarre that these folks are wiiling to immigrate in order to commit acts of barbarism? (Or, in the case of women, they are willing to immigrate to be trated barbously?)I would have thought that a travel brochure saying "Come to Syria to pray, rape 12 year olds and behead people would have far fewer takers. So I think "Where is the joy is a legit question. It must be somewhere. Perhaps the rapes and beheadings ARE the joy, that certainly is the picture that is being painted, but I still find it diffocult to comprehend.; 11/23/15, 6:54 PM
Sydney said...: I am often bewildered by the random or open thoughts of writers. I always like their works better when I don't actually hear or read interviews with them. Let me think of them as I will, not as they are.

The best writers don't even give you an impression of themselves. They're invisible. It's their characters you have thoughts about.; 11/23/15, 7:17 PM