August 27, 2023
"They’ve sent a personal essayist to review an academic essayist’s work, so I can’t help but remark upon the moments..."
"... when Lepore makes an effort to weave in her personal stories and winds up sounding like a tourist over-pronouncing the word croissant. Traits of loved ones ('She had an opinion on any movie. She had a crush on John Cusack. She loved to run') add up to something less vivid than her portraits of Albert Camus, Kurt Gödel and even Roger Ailes. Her social and domestic asides read as factual accounts of that which is nonfactual: an inner life. I also read some of her analogies with splayed fingers, starting with the first line: 'One summer day, the sun’s rays as spiky as a coronavirus.'"
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I can't say I've splayed my fingers when reading something cringe. If it's really awful, do I transition to jazz hands?
… and winds up sounding like a tourist over-pronouncing the word croissant.
Well, at least now we know what pretentious writing looks like.
Why didn’t Lepore ask Brewster Kathleen why he didn’t archive KiwiFarms?
"I can't say I've splayed my fingers when reading something cringe. If it's really awful, do I transition to jazz hands?"
She's criticizing LePore's writing but she's got some writing problems of her own. I believe she meant "I also read some of her analogies through splayed fingers...." (like the way a nervous person might view a horror movie).
None of Raymond Chandler's analogies is as awful as "the sun’s rays as spiky as a coronavirus," but they come so frequently the cumulative error produces more or less the same groan or ouch.
If an inner life is nonfactual, where do we go for self-understanding?
On the plus side, she made the LePore book sound interesting. I looked up Sloane Crosley on the internet. She appeared on the Craig Ferguson show five times. She's cute and witty, but you wouldn't know it from this piece.....I sometimes like to pick up out of print collections of essays by various pundits. Walter Lippmann and Murray Kempton got a lot of things wrong. Jimmy Cannon holds up pretty well. Nora Ephron gave Lillian Hellmann a lot more slack than she granted to Julie Nixon Eisenhower.
None of Raymond Chandler's analogies is as awful as "the sun’s rays as spiky as a coronavirus," but they come so frequently the cumulative error produces more or less the same groan or ouch.
I think reading "One summer day, the sun's rays as spiky as a coronavirus" just gave me a brain tumor.
*splays fingers in front as if pushing away*
"Whoa!TMI!"
I have no interest in reading anything by, or about, Jill Lepore. In her book 'These Truths" she has told an unforgivable lie about Sir Francis Drake, the man I consider the greatest explorer of the Age of Exploration and the greatest sea captain of all time. She asserts that off the coast of NC, in 1685, as he was returning to England from his latest venture in the Caribbean, he tossed 300 slaves, bound in chains, over the side of his ship so that he could make room for English settlers that wanted to return to England from Roanoke Island. She provides no footnote or reference to any contemporary account to support this, in fact, I don't think any other historian has ever made this claim. This behavior would have been completely out of character for Drake. It is well-known among historians that Drake's attitude toward slavery would have made a 19th Century British or Yankee abolitionist proud. When attacking the Spanish he would capture their slaves and free them, and even refused, when offered, to sell them back at any price. He would often hire freed slaves to serve as crew on his ships, replacing sailors who had been killed in combat or who had died from accidents or diseases and would pay them the same wages. I think it was in Panama, very early in his career, the he sought out and allied his force with a group of freed slaves hiding in the mountains, enlisting them in attacking the local Spanish port and sharing the spoils with them. I know that podcaster Jack Henneman, who produces the excellent weekly podcast series, "The History of the Americans," has expressed concerns about this story and contacted her about it, asking her to clarify her assertion and provide sources. I think that was about 2 years ago. So far, crickets. I know she is supposed to be a prominent writer and historian but a claim like this puts here down at the level of Nicole Hannah-Jones, in my opinion
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