What to think about that Esquire essay "In Praise of 42-Year-Old Women."

I'm really conflicted about this. I've been close to talking about it twice, and I find myself drawn back to it a third time, and I'm going to add that up to mean I've got to puzzle out the strange attraction, not of the 42-Year-Old Women but of this particular 55/56-year-old man writing about the 42-year-old woman... writing in Esquire about writing about the 42-year-old woman.

Instapundit wrote: "ADVICE TO EDITORS: Before you assign or publish an article, ask yourself, 'Will this article be more enjoyable than the Gawker blog post viciously mocking the article?'" which linked to Robert Stacy McCain, who was (obviously) linking to Gawker. At Gawker, Tom Scocca was eking humor out of paraphrasing the Esquire piece in plain speech, with lines like: "Tom Junod can name several famous women who are 42 who he would be willing to fuck. Right in their 42-year-old vaginas. Cameron Diaz. Sofia Vergara. Leslie Mann. Amy Poehler. He would fuck these women, despite their age, and even share a joke with them, because the 42-year-old woman, she is a person, or at least a person-like idea...." Which is funny, but it's only funny because Junod gave him something to paraphrase and the will to do it. But think about it: Much literary humor is done through the device of taking what would be crude to say and putting it in an elaborate form. Anyone can translate it back into the crude. And much internet hu

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And so — in the middle of a word — a post fragment ends. I'm tired of looking at that Draft post in my list of posts. I can't throw it out and I can't finish it. I'm just publishing it because I'm amused that my effort ended so abruptly. I felt some urge to defend Tom Junod, but not quite that much.

And then thi

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Oh, good lord! I did it again!

It's the Tom Junod jinx. But, hey, look, Tom Junod is writing about pit bulls: "The most ubiquitous dog in the U. S.—the dog in whose face we see our collective reflection—is now the pit bull. Which makes it curious that we as a culture kill as many as three thousand of them per day."

ADDED: I was able to overcome my writer's block and say what I wanted to say in the comments: here. That was weird.

"And then while your girl goes to the ladies', you go out front to smoke a cigarette..."

"... and on the way back you ask your waitress — the one with the tattoo of the meat cleaver on her grass-fed bicep — if she wants to go to a steakhouse on her night off."

A fine last sentence to an essay by Tom Junod called "The Death of the Entrée," published in the "Eat Like a Man" section of Esquire.

"What if he's right?"

Erstwhile Bush-loather Tom Junod faces a question that has been nagging at him. The article appears in the September Esquire, which I had grabbed from the rack at the beauty salon today, meaning to scan for info about facial hair on male models and celebrities. Waiting out the drying of "Cajun Shrimp"-colored nail polish, I finally tore myself away from a description of what it feels like to be bitten on the head by a leopard and read the Junod article. It's a good enough read, though the two main points are: 1. Take me seriously because I hated Bush, and 2. Terrorism is really very important. There's a lot of riffing along the lines of comparing Bush to Lincoln but claiming not to be comparing Bush to Lincoln. There is some snappy, Esquire-y writing, which is fun to read despite the sometimes annoying pseudo-hip tone that mixes breeziness with heavy-handed moralism. I did like this part:

The [Civil War] was, from first to last, portrayed as his [Lincoln's] war, and after he won landslide reelection, he made a vow not only to stay the course but to prosecute it to the brink of catastrophe and beyond: "Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.' "

Today, of course, those words, along with Lincoln's appeal to the better angels of our nature, are chiseled into the wall of his memorial, on the Mall in Washington. And yet if George Bush were to speak anything like them today, we would accuse him of pandering to his evangelical base. We would accuse him of invoking divine authority for a war of his choosing, and Maureen Dowd would find a way to read his text in light of the cancellation of some Buffy spin-off.