Letters to the Editor
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What is this?
I logged on to Salon today, trying to decide whether or not to renew my Premium subscription, and then I see a cover article that reminds me how disappointed I've been lately with Salon. Dreadful editorial decisions, and this one a new low.
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either stop running Ayelet Waldman's columns or bury them
I couldn't read beyond the first page of this little slice of solipsism. I consider myself a reasonably literate, well-informed person; as someone who was an English major in undergrad, I do keep track of major literary trends. Yet I'd never heard of "JT Leroy" before. Having clicked on the link to the story, I'm not about to run out and see what the fuss is all about now. This is NOT worthy of being Salon's lead, even on a slow news day (which this most certainly isn't). Bury this column in A&E/Books where it belongs. I would not have bothered to try to read it had it not been displayed so prominently.
Ayelet Waldman, as usual, is surprisingly clueless for someone who went to Harvard Law School (Remember the column where she seems to think that the best and highest way to indulge her love of babies would be to get pregnant for the fourth or fifth time? Rather than, say, adopting, waiting for grandchildren, volunteering in the neonatal ICU, taking in a foster child, or even babysitting? I quit reading her after that particular article--until today.). Then again, half the people at my second-tier law school were likewise otherwise ignorant legal savants...
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What is the deal with the Waldman-hate?
The people here slamming Waldman for no good reason need to get a grip. A boycott? Have you happened to notice we're about to get a very frightening addition to the Supreme Court? You might want to redirect some of that activist energy toward something that matters. I like Aldman's pieces -- everything I read does not have to be earth-shattering to be worthwhile.
re: JT Leroy...personally I think it's more a story for celebs than anyone else. Most of us did not spend hours -- or even minutes -- talking to the guy/gal. The Frey thing is a bigger deal because of the Oprah push, but honestly, that's much ado about nothing as well. So he was in jail 3 days instead of 3 months...so he liked a girl who died from afar rather than up close. Does that make him a "fraud?" Overblown, overblown. Eggers headed off this sort of criticism by saying up front that you can read it as fiction if you like, but this is the story of his life. How many times have you read a newspaper article where you personally knew the truth of the story and have been appalled at the number of flat-out factual errors that it included? If all SG could find after an exhaustive search were those elements of the story, I'd say Frey did a reasonable job keeping to the "facts."
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What the hell happened to Salon?
When I first began subscribing to Salon, I did so because the content was informative and engaging. It covered a whole range of viewpoints and complex topics. It was my primary source for news, and I wanted to support an upstart organization I considered valuable to the culture.
But by god, things have changed. There are probably one or two decent political articles per day, which almost always convey a non-compromising left-leaning point-of-view. Columnists like Ayelet Waldman are published frequently. Sure, her style and topics can be perceived as entertaining, but if I wanted entertainment I'd turn on the TV or pick up US Weekly. But a lead article on JT Leroy! Who cares about some fraudulent sensationalist? What about the Supreme Court confirmation hearings? What about Iraq?
Listen to NPR or the BBC and maybe you'll get a better idea of what news should be.
Also, Stephanie Zacharek's reviews are consistently negative. She pans almost every movie with any substance whatsoever -- like Brokeback Mountain -- and praises stuff like King Kong and Hellboy, for Christ sake! (I'll never forgive her for that.) Maybe she thinks she should hold better movies to higher standards, but if I based my movie choices on her columns I'd never go to the theater. Or I'd only see movies like Hellboy.
Come on, Salon! Wake up!
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Sleeping in the nothing
Before the JT Leroy hoax was first exposed a few months ago, I had never heard of "him." I didn't understand what the fuss was about then and I don't understand it now.
This is not a front-page, above-the-headline story. This isn't even a page six, throw-that-item-in-the-processor story. To be quite honest, Salon isn't even printing a story at all. I feel like I've just been digging through Ayelet Waldman's garbage and found her diary from high school.
How did this person fool anybody? The person in this picture is so obviously a woman approaching middle-age that it would take a clinical disconnect from reality coupled with a desperate willingness to believe in the "oooh, neat" exoticness of the Leroy persona to buy the goods that were being sold. Perhaps that is the true story behind the Leroy hoax, how these people were able to reveal the gullible, facade-hungry nature of a number of social circles, from celebrities to those who deem themselves literary elite by playing into their handy little prejudices of gays, the transgendered, and the "others" in the "South."
But then we have Ayelet Waldman, moaning about how she was sucked in to the Leroy hoax so easily. I can only imagine that she saw in Leroy her own narcissistic, self-indulgent persona reflected back at her like a kindred spirit. This is perhaps the genius of the Leroy hoax, attaching "him"self like a lamprey to similarly self-absorbed celebrities into a mutual admiration society of false constructs and shiny, happy people.
This is not the first time I have complained about Waldman's shamlessly egotistic coulmns. My Salon membership is coming up for renewal in about a month, and Waldman's continued sullying of what was once a fine alternative news source is seriously making me reconsider. I don't charge people to read my own weblog, and I refuse to pay money to read someone else's. And no, I'm not railing against Waldman because I want to sleep with Michael Chabon, since I've never read his writing, I have no idea what he looks like, and if I had to pick an author to sleep with, it would be Clive Barker, anyway. No, Waldman's shameless self-indulgence, and that fact that Salon feels her clueless, patronizing columns are more important than things like the Alito hearings and the war in Iraq, are causing me to double check my credit card statement to make sure it doesn't say "Yearly subscription, Us Weekly."