With a last line as self-aware as this one, I would have thought she’d have the presence of mind not to hit the Send button.
Archive for the ‘writing’ Category
Trifecta
Betty Friedan was dead just a couple of days and already the naysayers were out.
Why do I care? It’s just that I can’t help but see a trend—one I first noticed in March of 2005, when, just three months after Susan Sontag’s death, Terry Castle, in the London Review of Books, aired a list of personal grievances succinctly described by one friend as “very funny but rather nasty.” It says something about Sontag’s fierceness, and Castle’s cowardice, that she waited to print it until the moment when no rebuttal was possible.
And then there was Terry Teachout’s more measured consideration of how he did not like the plays of Wendy Wasserstein, although he found her exceedingly friendly as person. Fine. But the day after she died?
Why the new willingness to poop on the dead? And so quickly after they’re gone. To be sure, the opposite extreme is no better. Witness the sickening hypocrisy of Ronald Reagan’s apotheosis in death—by people who knew better—as if he had been a great president.
Could it have anything to do with the fact that they were powerful women?
ONCE AGAIN, THE NEW YORK TIMES IGNORES THE TRULY INTERESTING QUOTATION OF THE DAY
“ONE of my favorite writers, Jane Jacobs, talks about the benefits of drift in life. After 16 years, I want to do a little creative drifting. I honestly don’t know what is out there, but I’m certain there are exciting opportunities.”
JONATHAN KARP, who is leaving his job as editor in chief after 16 years at Random House.
