What does she look like, anyway? I imagine her blacktoothed and humpbacked, with rhinoceros eyes and an evil laugh. Narsty old crone. What the hell is her problem? She must've written 53 books and failed to publish them all to be able to secrete the quantity of venom that she does.
I'm referring, of course, to her review of John Banville's _The Sea_, in which her basic premise seems to be that the book should not have won the Booker Prize because it contains many words she does not understand.
Last night I had an almost identical conversation with Jasper at Ashley's about someone else's work, except that Jasper was being *facetious* when he said, "I hate his work because he uses words I don't know and it makes me feel stupid."
Also M.K. blathers on a bit about how the book doesn't have a plot and is purely meditative. Ahem. Since when is plot a necessary thing in a good book? _The Sea_ has the most gorgeous language, but I guess Ms. Kakutani doesn't really like that sort of thing.
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3 comments:
I'm not nearly motivated enough to scour the internet or the surprisingly lame Harper's website--god, would somebody please shoot Lewis Lapham??--in order to find it, but there was, cheese with a spoon, a wonderfully amusing short story published years ago in Harper's in which Ms. Kakutani is the sole focus of the narrator's tale. N obsesses over her because of a few lines she once wrote about a slender volume of writing he put out years and years ago--perhaps this could be my future? the future of hanging on to a few paragraphs of praise decades ago? I've been known to do this with women and glances...--and unless I'm mistaken the bulk of the text is comprised of missives to her. An epistolary, I guess. Anyway, at points it gets to be vaguely stalkerish, and thus there is raised the specter of his inflicting violences on your beloved Michiko, so perhaps this is the perfect salve for your illegal urgings?
Also let me please add, here, quickly, that I do not support cheese with a spoon's fatwa against Michiko Kakutani, because I have nothing but the highest regard for Ms. Kakutani and her reviews. She brings breathtaking insight into journalistic literary scholarship, and her taste is unparalleled. She is, quite frankly, a treasure.
Regards,
Todd Myles Carnam (that's C-A-R-N-A-M)
t.o.d.
I just googled you and this post doesn't show up. I guess we're not in the google world (yet). so you might have to wait awhile for michiko to notice your brown-nosing. some other interesting stuff came up when I googled you though...
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