Letters to the Editor
-
What a Group...
I personally have enjoyed Nora Ephron's writing for years -- never saw Sleepless, You've Got..., or Bewitched, so maybe that helps.
One thing I've noticed lately, however, is the vitriole associated wtih the letters to the editors lately. It's as if people are saving all their hatred just for the chance at hurting, slandering, or just being plain ignorant about someone they'll never meet. I mean, what did the previous poster say, something about Bernstein being a HACK??? Are you kidding me?
Seems to me that anytime anyone is honest on this website about, say, how much aging sucks or how they aren't entirely enamoured of being a parent 24/7, the righteous come seeping in from all directions, pointing out how wrong the writer is. Clearly a number of you have issues with RT's writing. Make a note of it, tape it to your monitor, and don't read her in the future.
Peggy
-
Well I still Love Ephron's Writing and Enjoyed the Article
When I first started as a journalist myself too many moons ago, I encountered Nora Ephron's Esquire work and geezus it made me laugh out loud. She still does.
I read her successive columns in major media, her collections and her novel thereafter. I still go back to them for a style fix now and then. Anyone who thinks Nora Ephron can't write wouldn't know good writing if an avalanche of it clunked them on the head in Tolstoy-sized chunks.
It isn't just her jokes, which work like stand-up comedy, it's her masterful use of parallel structure, of description, of all the tools we all use.
Movies are a collaborative medium even if the same person writes and directs them. So indeed, her films do not all hold up as well as her prose. But the best of them had the audiences I saw them with rolling in the ailes laughing or all teared up. Romantic comedies may be a guilty pleasure, but if you enjoy them, so what? It's not as if they're presented as high art.
I don't have a clue as to how she treats her movie crews, but she's always treated me to a good time as a writer.
I thought this was an excellent piece. Often, a good journalist's role is to give voice to the subject, not voice his or her own take on things. It really is not a journalist's job to attempt a serious work of criticism when doing an author interview. You sure understand reading this piece that not everyone cares for Ephron's work.
And one of the wonderful aspects of a free press is that everyone can weigh in through letters this way.
But I think a lot of you have lost a few things...a sense of humor, your minds...
Allan
-
I'm with Peggy.
Every other poster in this thread is a spitting cobra. I LOVE good old Salon. I also love the ancient interplay between readers and writers. I understand weathered women that struggle with the sagging of their necks and the social shifts such sagging induces. But I detest cyber-cobras that blindly spit into any old eye.
Can you cobraesque critics not afford therapy?
-
Damn, you people are mean
So someone admits that aging sucks for them. Everyone has problems and she totally admits that her problems aren't the kind that victims of drugs or crimes grew up with and or deal with. That doesn't mean that just because you have money and a career and kids that nothing is gonna upset you or make you wish for other days in your youth or that you have nothing to complain about. Your looks are part of your identity and when you watch your face and body drastically change it can affect you. Sometimes teens try to thwart aging by becoming anorexic, aging affectes different people different ways so she's not happy with her neck twaddle, I've yet to meet an older person who was all yeah, I've got chicken neck!
So her movies aren't the work of genuis like Citizen Kane or Godfather, big fucking deal. What is a big deal is that she has made movies that have made money and that some people like and she's a woman. So what if she didn't make some important feminist movies and yes, Bewitched sucked ass. Not everything in life is some deep issue rife with symbolism or meaning, everyday people deal with crap like in When Harry Met Sally or You've Got Mail.
Like the masses of America are deep thinkers and that's why we've got the idiot monkey boy in the White House. Not everything has to be high art and to decry a successful woman in the media because she doesn't make high art just makes you ungrateful bastards. No wonder Dems can't win shit, unless someone is the smartest and bestest in your eyes they are worthless.
Oh and decry Salon for being a business and part of business is promoting people's books or movies, ooh how crappy of Salon to get an interview with a sucessful woman and try to help her hawk her book. They get page hits and maybe Nora will sell a few more books, you don't like the way Salon runs things, get your own damn webzine then.
-
Woman of Repute?
She's a hack. She's made a lot of money. What repute? We're not talking Joan Didion here.
She's completely fraudulent. She grew up very well, went to the best schools, has worked for the best magazines, even had a celebrity marriage. And what does she do? She plies the wobegone Jewish schtick like she was some ugly duckling typing clerk in the Brox, bravely facing life's inequities with a self-deprecating smile. Circa 1940.
You'd think with her education, and her close observation of the power brokers in Washington, New York, and Hollywood, plus some genuinely tough life experiences, she might have been able to comment on her society, and the indiviual's role in it. At least something on the level of, say, Woody Allen. But that would take insight, daring, lower box office returns.
Or maybe, having grown up with writers, having always written, having always immediately turned her experiences into material, she was never involved in her life enough to have something to reflect upon and from which to produce anything substantial. These little worn-out Carol Burnett Show jokes are the closest she can get.
Whatever the case, there's no originality to the woman. A piece on stuffing her bra. How original. A book on her husband's cheating on her. How original. Sappy WASPish movies where boy meets girl and all ends blissfully. How original. And now, with all she's been through, the most she has to write about is "menopause isn't fun"?
When your latest manuscript mines the comedy of Joan Rivers interview chat, maybe it's a sign not to publish.