Like a Dog

A dog with the absurd name of “Bohem [sic] C’est la Vie,” aka “Vivi,” escapes from the baggage area of Kennedy Airport, and the authorities rush to deploy a helicopter and a dozen police officers to scour some 5,000 acres at considerable taxpayer cost. Even “pilots in the air told controllers that they would keep an eye out for the dog.”

Why all the hullaballoo over a little dog? Because its co-owner, Paul Lepiane, lied to the police about the show dog's value, which he'd inflated to more than $100,000 “to convince them to make helicopter searches.” (He later revised its value to between $15,000 and $20,000.)

The story, which has been generating a great deal of attention in the press, takes a sinister turn however when compared to another incident at JFK just a week earlier, a story that hasn't generated nearly as much attention but is far more tragic in its consequences.

Jiang Zhenxing, a 32-year old Chinese woman who had come to the U.S., married, given birth to two American sons, and opened with her husband a Chinese restaurant in Philadelphia, paying taxes on their earnings for about a decade, went to her regular appointment at the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office on Feb. 7. She was three months pregnant with twins.

When officials learned of her pregnancy, however, she was separated from her husband and sons, shuffled roughly into a van, and taken to JFK for immediate deportation. Jiang alleges the officers "manhandled her and ridiculed her pleas for medical help until it was too late." According to one account, the officers "stopped to eat lunch themselves but gave the pregnant woman nothing to eat during her eight-hour ordeal and cursed her when she cried and told them she was in pain. By the time they reached the airport, Ms. Jiang was suffering severe abdominal cramps and begging for help in a public waiting area..." Only when bystanders could no longer just stand by as Jiang cried out in pain did someone call an ambulance. (Where were the helicopters then?) By the time she made it to Jamaica Hospital Medical Center, her babies were dead.

A dog owner lies to airport authorities and gets them to mobilize a helicopter and dozens of men to search for a dog, as the nation's heart reaches out to the aggrieved owners. A pregnant woman in pain cries out for help at the same airport one week earlier and is ridiculed and mocked and ignored, as her unborn twins are left to die.

If only she'd been treated, one cannot help but lament in retrospect, like a dog.

Monster Shopper

In her latest Critical Shopper column in the New York Times, Alexandra Kuczynski, the obscenely wealthy daughter of the Wall Street banker and (despite his Franco-Polish descent and naturalized US citizenship) current prime minister of Peru, Pedro-Pablo Kuczynski, shrieks at the spot of uncleanliness diminishing her shopping pleasure at the SoHo Apple store.

After noting the absence of staff to wipe down with "antibacterial spray" the keyboards and mice ("gripped by grimy hands all day long"!), she continues in the eloquent literary style that has won her a prestigious column at the paper of record:

On my last visit I saw one young man sneeze voluminously into his hands, then type on the keyboard and grapple with the mouse. Yuck! Two seconds after he left the station, a woman and her child began to fiddle with the mouse and keyboard. Triple yuck!

Of course her disgust at the unhygienic displays of the young mother and child might have been slightly more affecting had she not, some paragraphs earlier, admitted to throwing an iPod Mini — "ear buds and all — into a garbage can on Fifth Avenue" in a fit of annoyance, thus polluting the city with the electronic device's toxic heavy metals without a second's compunction.

Her obsessive self-regard and narcissistic sense of entitlement have rarely been on better display.

Nasty Daddy

A recent biography of the French writer Michel Houellebecq confirmed what most readers probably already suspected, namely that much of his fictional work was taken directly from 'life'. The figure of the mother, in particular, has been singled out for especial abuse in his work. Like the appallingly negligent mother in Les Particules élémentaires, according to this article in the London Review of Books (via Arts & Letters Daily) Houellebecq’s mother “was born to a pied-noir family in Algeria, became a student radical, trained as a doctor and then lived an alternative, itinerant lifestyle” (in the book she “joins a sinister cult and spends much of her time bedding young men and boys”).

As for Houllebecq’s father, well, he was dispensed with at the beginning of Plateforme:

Father died last year. I don’t subscribe to the theory by which we only become truly adult when our parents die; we never become truly adult.
As I stood before the old man’s coffin, unpleasant thoughts came to me. He had made the most of life, the old bastard; he was a clever cunt. ‘You had kids, you fucker . . .’ I said spiritedly, ‘you shoved your fat cock in my mother’s cunt.’ Well, I was a bit tense, I have to admit; it’s not every day you have a death in the family.

Houellebecq himself was abandoned by his parents, “who set off across Africa in a 2CV five months after their son’s birth and left him with his grandparents in Algiers. Michel only saw his parents during the holidays. “‘I grew up with the clear knowledge that a grave injustice had been done to me,’ he told one interviewer. ‘What I felt for them was mostly fear, as far as my father was concerned, and a clear disgust vis-à-vis my mother.’ ‘Until my death, I will remain an abandoned little child, howling from fear and cold, starved of caresses.’"

Indeed, Houellebecq condemns not only his parents but their generation of hippies and soixante-huitards for all manner of social disaster. In Atomised, the cult to which Bruno’s mother belongs turn from free love to ritual murder. In one of the most quoted passages from the book, Houllebecq writes: ‘Actionists, beatniks, hippies and serial killers were all pure libertarians who advanced the rights of the individual against social norms and against what they believed to be the hypocrisy of morality, sentiment, justice and pity. From this point of view, Charles Manson was not some monstrous aberration in the hippy movement, but its logical conclusion.’

Given the monstrous injustice Houellebecq feels was commited against him by his parents, one might think he’d treat his own children a little better, in his books, if not in life. In life we learn that Houellebecq produced a child from a short early marriage. How horribly sad, then, to read in his latest book, the following: ‘On the day of my son’s suicide, I made a tomato omelette . . . I had never loved that child: he was as stupid as his mother, and as nasty as his father.’

Judging a Book...

On the backflap of the dustjacket to John Carey's new book What Good are the Arts? can be read the following brief biography:

John Carey is the Chief Book Reviewer for The Sunday Times (London). He has been at various points in his life a soldier, a television critic, a beekeeper, a bartender, and a professor of literature at Oxford.

He is also, evidently, a complete ass. The blurb alone was enough to convince me not to thumb any further. You can tell a lot about a book from its blurbs. Shameless boasting is not something that speaks well for a writer, particularly when he tries to mask it with pseudo-humility (evident in the rather self-applauding way Carey lists even his "humbler" professions).

It reminded me of what is undoubtedly the best (or worst) example of obnoxious blurbing in recent times. That distinction belongs to Arthur Phillips, who had the following printed about himself on the dustjacket of his book Prague:

Arthur Phillips was born in Minneapolis and educated at Harvard. He has been a child actor, a jazz musician, a speechwriter, a dismally failed entrepreneur, and a five-time Jeopardy! champion. He lived in Budapest from 1990 to 1992 and now lives in Paris with his wife and son.

Not Half-Assed: A Defence of the Semicolon

"The semicolon," an editor at The Washington Post once wrote in a misguided guide to good writing, "is an ugly bastard, and I try to avoid it," period. Perhaps he was misled by its name, which—comprised of the diminishing prefix semi- and the unfortunately denominated colon (a combination to which our title makes candid reference)—is rather ugly.

A recent article (via Arts & Letters Daily) explores the origins and issues of this strange prejudice, largely American, against our favorite punctuation mark. Falling somewhere between the comma and the period, the semicolon is rarely mandated, almost always discretionary; its employment a matter more of nuance than of necessity. This may render it superfluous, in the eyes of some, but its adept usage for that reason has become a subtle measure by which to distinguish the more or less literate, say, from the merely alphabetic.

If the semicolon really were an ugly bastard in any case its injunction in the field of journalism would not be as pressing, to employ a useful analogy, as the injunction against sexual harassment in the work place. That such a rule is not only in place but carefully observed signals that the semicolon is, to the contrary, a rather sexy bastard and requires preservation from the paws of the unscrupulous and miseducated.

"The most common abuse of the semicolon, at least in journalism," explains Michael Kinsley, the former editor of the New Republic (where he instituted the injunction against semicolons), "is to imply a relationship between two statements without having to make clear what that relationship is." Yes, precisely. But what is exceptionable in news writing can be exceptional in other contexts.

The most popular French writer of our day, Michel Houellebecq, has proclaimed that he has no literary style other than "to make harmless statements the juxtaposition of which produces an absurd effect." He singles out this sentence in particular from The Elementary Particles: "He could no longer remember his last erection; he waited for the storm." And this one:

L’éternité de l’enfance est une éternité brève, mais il ne le sait pas encore ; le paysage défile.

[The eternity of childhood is a brief eternity, but he does not know it yet; the landscape rolls on.]

"In those situations," comments Houellebecq, "I notice I often use the semicolon. I say 'absurdity' only out of politeness actually; I would prefer that this be seen as poetry."

As at least one critic points out, Kafka's absurd juxtaposition in his journal entry of 2 August 1914 is the model here: "Germany declared war on Russia. Swimming in the afternoon." (Of course this minimalist 'style,' the critic notes, can quickly descend into the merely ridiculous, of the type: "I get hard; it rains.")

In Houellebecq's latest novel, The Possibility of an Island, one finds this sentence: "Life begins at the age of fifty, it's true; except that it ends at forty." Absurd, certainly; but not entirely ridiculous. I refer not to the statement itself but its structure. What it presents is the contradiction of dialectic, competing and cancelling views, articulated at the balancing point-virgule. Not only is the semicolon among the most literary of punctuation marks, it is perhaps the most philosophical; its very existence a poke in the face of self-satisfied Truth.

In its embrace of nuance and ambiguity the semicolon may appear precious and fey; "pretentious, even poncy." In a word, European. Today's world, we are told, requires muscular, emphatic language, unencumbered by such complications. Yet however in disfavor it may be at the moment, the semicolon will never disappear. Indeed it will only gain in allure as it becomes more and more popularly despised and goes unrecognized as anything more than a winking smiley amongst the cretinously stupid youth.

Bono Vivant

It appears that when U2 superstar Bono is not unloading bags of millet and barley for the wretched of Africa, he likes to suck down oysters, rip into chunks of bloody meat and wash it all down with bottles of wine the price of which could have nourished a starving child for a year or more.

Describing a lunch with the U2 singer at the New York City bistro, Balthazar, James Traub writes in today's New York Times Sunday Magazine that the aspiring Messiah "ordered half a dozen oysters, the filet mignon and a half-bottle — and then, sometime later, another half-bottle — of a Clos de Vougeot."

At another steak dinner described in the article, which is generally hagiographic in tone, the following transpires:

Bono had started with a glass of white wine, but when I said I was drinking red, he switched over and ordered a bottle of Brunello di Montalcino. U2's manager, Paul McGuinness, is a wine nut, and Bono caught the bug from him. Bono has unabashedly bourgeois tastes, and he spends his money on the kinds of things most of us would spend our money on if we had as much as he does — a family-size Maserati, a house on the Riviera, a charming hotel in Dublin, great food and wine. I was raving about the Brunello, which was many stations above the norm for me. Bono was less impressed, but he didn't want to dampen my enthusiasm. "It is," he said, after some consideration, "a not immodestly great wine."

So in addition to being a pop star, "brother of the oppressed, Christian visionary, ironic trickster, devoted husband and father," Bono also likes to affect the mannerisms of a sniffy wine snob. That he delivered his witheringly superior judgement in pink oversize sunglasses and in an "Irish publican brogue," Traub helpfully informs the reader, renders the act "endearing" in his eyes rather than simply insufferable.

Kimchi Bitchin'

In his bizarre review of the controversial, though much acclaimed Korean film Oldboy, critic Rex Reed writes:

For sewage in a cocktail shaker, there is Oldboy, a noxious helping of Korean Grand Guignol as pointless as it is shocking. What else can you expect from a nation weaned on kimchi, a mixture of raw garlic and cabbage buried underground until it rots, dug up from the grave and then served in earthenware pots sold at the Seoul airport as souvenirs? Directed by Chan-wook Park, a film-festival “comer” in this nation of emerging cinematic schlock, a cheerful drunk named Dae-su Oh disappears from the phone book and is sealed in a room for 15 years. [...] Blood flows, there is much vomiting and incest, and more screams than Japanese kabuki. Part kung fu, part revenge-theme Charlie Chan murder mystery, part meta-physical Oriental mumbo-jumbo, all of it incomprehensible.

In the span thus of just a single paragraph, Reed manages to pack at least one cultural, ethnic, and/or racial insult for just about every sentence he scratches out. What makes Reed's "review" especially worthy of comment, however, is the particularly clichéd nature of his abuses, which display all the marks of the classic racist jeer, namely:

• Gross and spurious generalization: On the basis of a single film, Reed not only denigrates the entire Korean cinematic tradition, he denigrates the entire Korean nation, culture, and people (and in a sly way, all Asians--see below).
• Deliberate indistinction: Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees.... all the same, right? Wrong. Reed's gratuitous references to Japanese kabuki, Chinese kung fu, and perhaps most disturbingly, the American yellow-face Charlie Chan, are all wildly inappropriate in the context of a review of this Korean film.
• Jeering Condescension: "What else can you expect from a nation..." Enough said? Well, if you can describe Chan-wook Park, who has been making feature films for 13 years, some of which have broken box-office records in Korea and other Asian nations as a "film festival 'comer' in this nation of emerging cinematic schlock," you could at least dismiss a film that won the second highest prize at Cannes with something more than a shameful display of personal prejudice.
• Yellow-peril stereotyping: From the inscrutable Chinaman ("Oriental mumbo-jumbo") to the smelly food ("raw garlic...rots"), trinket mercantilism ("sold at the Seoul [sic] airport as souvenirs"), and Asiatic cruelty (later in the review he wonders aloud whether an actual tongue has been severed), Reed deploys a wide range of stereotypes so ingrained in his imagination that he remains oblivious to the profound cultural and racial offense he gives.

Reed's indignation at the film's violence (he says he walked out of the film when the protagonist excises his own tongue with a pair of scissors) rings a little hollow when one considers how he gushed and raved at the arguably more brutal film Saw (2004): "The gore is relentless and in your face...you won't want to miss a minute of the mayhem!"

Of course Reed has cultivated for himself a bitchy, self-caricaturing tone and image in his reviews for years. If only he could find a way of humiliating himself in his nationally syndicated column without debasing others in the act.

The Rap of G. Liddy

Criminal talk-radio host G. Gordon Liddy, a tiny old man with weak wrists from the burns he self-administered to make himself "strong," who overcame his fear of rats by roasting one and eating it, who taught his toddlers (bred from a "tall, fair, powerfully built Teuton" of a mate) to start fights lest they be beaten first, explains how bombing the Red River dykes would've brought a more satisfying conclusion to the Vietnam War: "It would have drowned half the country and starved the other half."

The suffering of the murdered innocent is as irrelevant to him, notes Johann Hari in an interview, "as that of the chickens he decapitated with such glee sixty years ago in New Jersey."

Why does this pathological caricature of masculinity have an amplifying system for his views?