While all this was going on, the mobster Yaponchik died of his gunshot wounds. Police predicted that the gangster’s death could lead to an all-out war between Moscow’s major criminal groups. Keeping in mind that he was a very bad man who probably killed many people, does Yapnochik’s death make the video I posted of him getting shot funnier or less funny?
So now that it’s more or less passed, some thoughts on what I’ve learned from the latest internet fracas occasioned by my response to the Awl’s criticism of Mark Greif’s piece on abortion and gay marriage in Issue 8.
Careful readers will recall that last year, after a similar series of online fracases with Gawker, I formulated several handy rules, such as: Only get involved in an online debate on your work if it’s a factual matter which only you can correct (i.e. the information is not publicly available—e.g. Gawker accuses you of drinking lattes, whereas you’ve never had a latte, but who else knows that but you?). Also, try not to argue with people who are just insulting you: If the New York Times calls you a jerk, will you write a letter to the Times saying you’re not a jerk? Probably not. So don’t write a letter to the internet. In a best-case scenario you’ll find yourself in an argument where you’re saying, “You shouldn’t have insulted us,” and the other person is saying, “Yes I should have.” That’s not a very interesting argument.
In this case, I maybe violated one or both of these rules, but in the process I came up with another: Don’t try to stand athwart an internet meme. In this case the meme was, “That essay sucked!!” There are many things to object to in the essay, and some of them are in fact extremely interesting (#1: what does it mean for a straight man to demand more radicalism from the gay rights movement?) and in the coming days we’re going to post some letters at nplusonemag pointing some of those things out (not too late to write a letter to the editor, if you’re so inclined: editors at nplusonemag.com), but that is not equivalent to suckiness. But since the non-suckiness of the essay is absolutely self-evident to me, I may not be the best person to argue about it. Also I’m clearly biased. I should have consulted with Bill Wasik, author of And Then There’s This, a book that deals at least partly with memes. I think he would have counseled waiting this one out.
All that said, I’d like to add this: Dear internet! Why are you so goddamn touchy? I have to listen to people saying n+1 is this and that, that Mark Greif—Mark Greif!!—is a “pussyhound,” although simultaneously he doesn’t know what sex is, wasn’t born in the 20th century, doesn’t know history, etc. etc.—and then I call the Awl a “news aggregator” and you go apeshit. Jesus Christ! Look. Despite the fact that the majority of the posts on the Awl are, in fact, news items with short, snappy commentary, a la Gawker (though with different emphases), I am aware that the Awl is a plucky new independent magazine that also posts reportage and essays and columns—for example, the witty and useful Social A’s column by Emily Gould, who happens to be my girlfriend, and who also happens to have once called the Awl an “aggregator” (without meaning it as a dig). That’s where I got the term, even though I did of course mean it as a dig. But left to my own devices I’d have called it something more obviously insulting—a “shit-mobile,” say.
But look, internet. You’ve made great strides over the years. Your traffic is up, your type-face has improved, Wall Street is still wowed despite the trauma you inflicted on it a decade ago, the lords of the mainstream media quake in their boots when they hear the very mention of your name—you bestride the world like a colossus, internet. So WILL YOU PLEASE GET OVER THIS GODDAMN INFERIORITY COMPLEX? It just makes it impossible to talk to you.
As ever,
Keith
Everybody’s all, “Gessen SHUDDUP you suck you Harvard Harvard Harvard sucks!!!!!!!!!” It’s like the Yale game all over again. And I didn’t even mention Harvard.
But you should see what that last post did for my Tumblarity. Better luck next year, suckers.
Yesterday the news-aggregator site The Awl posted a reading of Mark Greif’s piece on abortion and gay marriage from the latest issue of n+1. It’s the old complaint, which boils down to: What is this intellectual mumbo-jumbo?? Speak English! I can’t understand you!!
Typically the people making these complaints can understand just fine. The pose of incomprehension is just that, a pose. Why this pose—which for a thinking person is really a disgraceful pose, if you ask me—tends to be struck most often by writers for the New York Observer is a mystery probably someone else should solve. Having said that, and looking at it again, I see there’s a certain amount he really didn’t understand. Let me help out.
Mark Greif is the reason we started n+1. His essays really were too difficult, too knotty, and his polemical positions were too extreme. There was no place for pieces like “Against Exercise,” “Mogadishu, Baghdad, Troy,” “Afternoon of the Sex Children.” His sentences really are sometimes too long—BK says that sometimes they sound as if they’d been translated from German—and you really do have to stare at them a while sometimes before you can figure out what they mean. But they do mean something—they are the product of a mind at work, I mean really at work, right now, today, trying to figure out what’s happening, and bringing to bear on it a great deal of reading, and emotion, and thought.
The piece in question about gay marriage and abortion is part of Mark’s ongoing investigation of what happened to our modern utopia—why, when we have been freed from factory work, do we re-invent the forms of physical coercion at the gym? Why, when we have been freed of hunger, do we re-import strictures and limitations into our eating? Why, when we have so many channels, don’t we do anything with them truly worthwhile? Here is the beginning of Mark’s piece on reality TV:
The utopia of television nearly came within reach in 1992, on the day cable providers announced that cable boxes would expand to 500 channels. Back then, our utopian idea rested on assumptions both right and wrong. We assumed network-sized broadcasters could never afford new programming for so many active channels. That was right. We also assumed TV subscribers wouldn’t stand for 500 channels of identical fluff, network reruns, syndicated programs, second-run movies, infomercials, and home shopping. That was wrong.
The whole piece (from Issue 3) here.
The latest piece, on gay marriage and abortion, makes the argument that the utopian promise of those two very recent developments in American life—that is, the right to choose one’s sexual partner freely, and the right to choose whether to have a child—has been abrogated in favor of a rhetoric of piety, where too much ground is ceded to the “values voters.”
Today gay progress is in an expansionist phase under the banner of the right to marry… Feminism is reduced to pleading for abortion rights, while the common sense of three decades ago is hemmed in by a secular right wing that has adopted the extremism of orthodox religion. Abortion defenders must pretend that it is a “tragic” but necessary evil; a redoubt of “choice,” just like any other choice.
On marriage:
Here is marriage: The division of humanity into closed couples, when modernity has given us a chance at something much better… [and given us opportunities to have so many of the things marriage used to give *without marriage*. And so:] When marriage has as its main purpose a total and unique defense against loneliness and isolation and anomie, then it’s been saddled with a function too grand and dishonest for it ever to meet; no wonder it will seem imperfect, disappointing, not yet the right, final marriage.
On gay marriage:
And yet if you commit to marriage as your end, you win the piety battle, or, say, the war for harmless cuddliness. To marry is the closest adult thing to making your eyes big, your forehead rounded, and your hands into adorable little paws. Look at hubby-wubby! It is so responsible. It says that your desire is not for pleasure or fun, it is for fitting in. It is for the maintenance of what already is. How can you refuse these sweet-natured, utterly ordinary and gentle people—gay marriage-ists—who want to sacrifice themselves to this really rather miserably difficult institution, one which doesn’t even work well for straights, who have it so easy? Opposing gay marriage is like denying the wishes of people who want to feed your pets or take out your garbage. For moderates, on the fence about bigotry, it really will be too cute to deny.
And on abortion:
Abortion, unlike marriage, is unlovely. It’s a basic practical necessity of modern values, like sports medicine and hotels, but it is being sentimentalized out of existence by its opponents. Defenders seem cowed by the climate of opinion the sentimentalists have created. “Choice” worked as a rallying cry for a long time. But it’s hardly enough if you can’t also say what abortion itself is really for, and why it’s not “sad but necessary” but right and good.
This is a tough and risky and controversial argument because obviously those legal rights, fought for by a previous generation, are real achievements. What Mark is suggesting is that by not being fought for now, more aggressively, they are in danger of being lost and eroded. Maybe he’s wrong about that, or maybe the argument is slightly different—not that they will be lost but that we’ll settle for them, when we should be demanding more.
Anyway, here’s the piece. See what you think.
While I’m at it, here’s the mobster Yaponchik getting shot last month. (I posted this previously in the comments.) He walks out of the restaurant, gets shot in the abdomen (by a sniper parked in a van across the street), then gets pulled back inside. If Russia had some parking laws, maybe they wouldn’t let snipers park in vans like that.
Careful readers will recall the video I kept posting of the president of Ingushetia getting blown up. Well he has recovered now, and returned to Ingushetia, and this is the photo from two days ago of the car of the guy who supposedly organized the assassination attempt on him, after a shootout with police. Driving continues to be dangerous, in other words, in Russia.
While waiting for this week’s New Yorker, may I recommend something from last week’s? It used to be in Russian!
http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2009/08/31/090831fi_fiction_petrushevskaya
?
Elif Batuman’s long-awaited comedy traffic school piece is in this week’s New Yorker. This is, by my rough count, Elif’s fourth New Yorker piece—after Thai boxing, the ice palace, and the Lowell House Russian Orthodox stolen bells. And this got me to thinking, what if someone else were, like me, an Elif completist, and wanted to collect all of Elif’s work? You could try Elifbatuman.com, but sadly that thing is way out of date. Luckily, I’m here to help. As an Elif completist, in addition to the New Yorker pieces, you would need:
“Babel in California,” n+1, issue 2
“Adventures of a Man of Science,” n+1, issue 3
“Rearranging the furniture,” on Victor Shklovsky, The Nation, 2005 sometime
“The Short Story,” n+1, issue 4
Her piece on Akhmatova in the Nation.
Her piece on Platonov in the New York Sun.
The piece in Harper’s about Tolstoy’s murder, except we don’t talk about that, due to its being a sore subject a little bit around here (the piece going to Harper’s, that is, not the murder).
“Summer in Samarkand, pt. 1,” n+1, issue 7
Her piece in the LRB on postwar French philosophy, that was awesome.
And her two things way back in the Harvard Advocate, fall 1997 and winter 1998, I think.
And then you’d have it all. So far.
Dear Tumblr, I’m re-posting this video. I think I undersold it yesterday. There is a massive explosion at 1:38 of this thing!! OK. -Keith
I’ve gotten away from the basics of this blog—Russian automobile traffic—recently, and my tumblarity has suffered because of it. But no more. Careful readers will remember the photos from earlier this summer of the President of Ingushetia’s blown-up car. A little while ago they released this video of the incident. It takes a while to get going. Watch for the black Honda turning around on the road. Then the presidential motorcade appears. Then it looks like nothing is happening, and then it does.
The president was airlifted to a Moscow hospital about three blocks from my house and fixed right up (though not by me). He’s back at work this week.
—Daniel Mendelsohn in Newsweek. Is this the same Daniel Mendelsohn who praised the Holocaust fantasy Everything Is Illuminated to the skies? More to the point, of course there *were* Jewish avengers, or “death squads,” after WWII, whose express mission it was to kill former Nazis. (Some of this is described in Tom Segev’s very good book, The Seventh Million. It’s also described, fictionally, in Avner Mandelman’s story collection, Talking to the Enemy, which I once reviewed here and still think is great.) Mendelsohn no doubt knows about all this. So what’s he talking about?
It’s also worth mentioning that Jewish avengers Eli Roth and B. J. Novak attended my high school. Where we grew up, there weren’t that many Nazis. Well, until you crossed Commonwealth Avenue, at which point all bets were off. Way to kill Nazis, you guys.
Fielding some industry questions about the sandwich book over at the n+1 twitter.
Presidential (or other government VIP) retinue traveling down a street in central Moscow. Note how the street is deserted—all traffic lights on feeder streets have to this point been red for five, ten, possibly fifteen minutes. Via Blinkin at gzt.ru.
Quoting the original judgment, as to why Cherney should be allowed to sue Deripaska in England—
“As to the first of Mr Cherney’s concerns, Mr Stewart [Deripaska’s lawyer] submitted that Mr Cherney is no more likely to be the subject of an assassination attempt in Russia than he was in Israel or is anywhere else. I do not accept that. Whoever tried to have him killed in Israel was almost certainly Russian based. The risk of a successful assassination seems to me likely to be greater in the place where the person or persons who might wish to have him killed reside and where the requisite personnel and materiel are likely to be more readily available.”
—the appellate court comments:
That assessment is based on sound reasoning and it is not for the Court of Appeal to reassess the position.
