Letters to the Editor
softdog
Published Letters: 186 Editor's Choice: 8
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It's not opinion, a study I don't have proves it is true!
[Read the article: Hillary at twilight]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"More than one study has been done on the subject of media bias - for Obama, against Clinton. Conclusion: it's verifiable. I can't remember the source (a highly reputable media watchdog)"
KateTex: If you are trying to make a substantial point, instead of just make one up, "I can't remember the source" fails utterly. You might as well say, "I'm pulling this out of my ass." There's no excuse for such evasions in the google age. Find these multiple studies and provide the links so we can read them ourselves.
Until that point, you're just blowing smoke. You might as well be saying, "I can't remember the source, but I'm sure a highly reputable watchdog says Mexico steals tourist kidneys."
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More on KateTex
[Read the article: Hillary at twilight]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I see in a follow up letter you provide a quote from a Media Matters report of one incident on one tv show. This does not prove your claim that multiple studies prove an ongoing media bias. Nice bait and switch attempt.
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The man who ruined petty contrarian obits.
[Read the article: The man who ruined the novel]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]In order for Stephen Marche to justify gleefully pissing on the corpse of a little known writer, he must persuade us Robbe-Grillet actually had influence over the world of letters.
He fails. Marche barely defines Robbe-Grillet's ideas, names only one of his works and quotes just six words of his writing.
Marche also delights in pointing out Robbe-Grillet's lack of success and visibility, which undermines the idea the author had some effect on novels.
The real point is another midlist author whining about The State of The Novel, which he deems bad probably because he isn't as famous as Nabokov.
Like one of Nabokov's characters, Marche decides to blame this dubious claim on a dead Frenchman with increasingly absurd reasoning: "It is entirely appropriate that six months before Robbe-Grillet died, James Wood became the principal literary critic at the New Yorker."
Why, um, sure Steve. Also, Atonement was made into a movie just a year before Robbe-Grillet died. Get it? Get it?
I guess there's a subculture of grad students who resented having to read Robbe-Grillet. If so, just admit this grudge, this rambling attempt to make the petty significant just makes Stephen Marche seem like a vengeful twerp.
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An excuse with feigned humor is still a bullshit excuse.
[Read the article: Attention, all you memoir fabulists!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The subtext of this piece is clear, "what is reality anyway? You could question the truth of many works."
Bullshit. Bringing up the Bible, or a freaking poem by Walt Whitman is just obscuring the open fraud of this recent scandal.
It's not a slippery slope between issues of memory and flat out documented lies, it's a chasm.
There's no equivocation to be made out claiming you ran with the wolves after escaping the warsaw ghetto, or being a white suburbanite making up shit about the inner city.
I'm always amused at this sort of "shades of grey" and "emotional truth" crap coming from people who are most likely outraged at the brazen falsehoods surrounding the Iraq war. Well guess what people - you are engaging in the same justifications and moral evasions of definitions as the Bush administration when you pretend memoir is just another shade of fiction with no journalistic obligations.
I think what motivates those who are so willing to indulge truthiness with quasi-intellectual arguments is a severe discomfort with what these exposures reveal. Especially the intense racism and exploitation in these two recent cases, where white folk felt just fine appropriating the stories of the less fortunate for fame and profit. Or why a white woman could not only get away with lies, but lies which fed white assumptions about the inner city.
I wonder if those defending this example as if it were no different from a faulty memory realize the author set up a fake charity to help sell her book - and has been exposed as having lied about reaching out to the people she claimed were the reason she told those noble lies.
Of course, facing up to this might mean taking responsibility for our own moral boundaries. And high lit types have the privilege of not having to worry about that.