Wednesday, December 29, 2004

 
Re Jonah's "Your Jealousy Burns Brighter Than A Thousand Suns"-It was *not* the inspiration for the nickname of the sidekick of Paul "Butch" Wolfowitz a few posts ago, but I'll admit to *some* jealousy regarding what may be reasonably assumed to be a highly enriched(albeit probably nerdy) childhood. Jonah's Corner post regarding his Christmas gift ends with, "In english: it's the verbatim transcript of a round of show-trials. As my dad says in the inscription to me, "What a patehtic[sic] travesty for browsing!"

He bought it from an oddball street-seller in his neighborhood. I must be the only kid on the block who got one of these."


It also reminded me of a link(slate.msn.com/id/2000133/entry/1004163/) stumbled upon when trying to find confirmation that a character played by Woody Allen cowered behind a copy of *Commentary* magazine while Sylvester Stallone's character[like JD, an "uncredited thug"]terrorized passengers on a subway train.
Here's some of one of the letters found in that link which may be something of a window into the world of urban wunderkinden:
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From: David Bell
Subject: Archer's Follies
Monday, Dec. 13, 1999, at 3:27 PM PT
Dear Dad,

Yes, sad to say, I have indeed read most of Jeffrey Archer's novels. If you excuse the analogy, they're something like sordid one-night stands. You stay up late in bed with them, breathless and excited, but when you wake up in the morning next to them you feel ashamed and disgusted with yourself.

Still, it's nice to know you're not bothered by the fact that I've read them. The thing about growing up the son of two New York intellectuals is that reading trashy fiction somehow seems worse--more of a "transgressive act," as some of my academic colleagues would put it--than many other minor crimes and misdemeanors (even more than using the word "hopefully" incorrectly). The nightmare scenario runs as follows. I'm sitting in a quiet corner somewhere, devouring the latest Michael Crichton, the cover carefully hidden from sight. Suddenly, from nowhere, in walks Diana Trilling. "Ah, the son of Daniel Bell and Pearl Kazin," she says, her great eyes shining sternly. "What are you reading? Proust? Dostoyevsky? Faulkner? The Liberal Imagination?" I tremble so hard the book falls out of my hands, and she sees the cover. The shame! The humiliation! Of course, Woody Allen captured this idea perfectly in Bananas, in the scene where he buys a pile of intellectual journals, and tries to slip a copy of a pornographic magazine in with them, only to have the shop owner holler, "Hey Harry, how much for a copy of Orgasm?" Later, Allen sits on the subway, gazing at the offending item, which he has neatly tucked into the latest edition of Commentary, with an article by Irving Kristol on the cover (another favorite Woody Allen line, of course, comes in Annie Hall, when he quips that Dissent and Commentary have merged to form a new magazine called Dysentery--I was probably one of the few 11-year-olds to laugh at that one)......."
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