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Saturday, Nov 7, 2009
When the editor announces a shift to food-porn style writing, it's after Ann returns from a monthlong vacation. The vacation obviously came too late, since Ann had already been putting on her brave-girl face for a few months. Can anyone begrudge the editor a change in personnel? Ann's fall from grace was a long time coming.
The rockstar writer began to lose her passion and started showing frustration with editorial policy. This was followed by a passive-aggressive policy of snipping critical magazine articles, after which she was finally replaced by a passionate and inexpensive amateur with some writing skill.
Life's A Bitch, And So Am I!
"And I wish those who keep reminding us how much they dislike Salon would just go. Really. Just go. Keep your snark to yourself. We won't miss you. Go on, now. Shoo."
Dea, didn't you have this to say about Camille Paglia?
"Come on, Salon
[Read the article: Dancing as fast as she can]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]
Do we really need Paglia? She's neither funny nor insightful, and she can't write worth a damn.
And who buys her books anyway? After doing a grad school research project on Paglia's particular brand of "feminism" and reading a great deal of her work, I can't stay far enough away from her. I thought I'd give her another try with this article, but it's more of the same unreadable crap.
I'm disappointed to see the return of Paglia's unbridled venom, (unwarranted) intellectual arrogance, and self-referentiality to these pages. I won't bother to read any more of it."
I happen to agree with both your defense of the food slut (although I would have put it more mildly) and your vehement dismissal of Paglia. But you're still being hypocritical. You could argue that you were critiquing the author, not the site, but so could a lot of posters in this forum. Why shouldn't we get to complain about Salon? Sometimes it really, really sucks, like when it re-recruits Paglia, or to some people, when it pumps out (as others have said) self-referential, arguably whiney articles about the perils of journalism. We're all free to be here, and we're all free to find fault with Salon's material, so stop with that irritating "shoo" bit.
and furthermore, what are you doing in your last post if not snarking on the snarkers? geez..
With Type II Diabetes and heart disease lined up around the drive thru at McDonalds.
In a country where most of the population is obese and still continues to eat themselves into the grave anyone who has a modicum of self-control to eat only half their entree should be lauded not derided in self-serving tones of thinly vieled "Fat-Pride".
It is really amazing how much the average American eats and how much the Average American gets served at a restaurant. Even the swankiest $200 a plate establishment puts buffet sized portions in front of a person that would be two meals in Europe or two days worth of food for a family in Somalia.
Watching people eat nowadays is like watching a twisted, unattractive version of the Roman Feast minus the binging and purging. You haven't gotten your money's worth from a restaurant until you leave, hobbling out, busting at the seems, bloated.
Maybe those well-dressed, skinny Foodies understood that eating can be more than just an exercise in consumption.
For an integrated and holistic approach to food and eating, check out Deborah Kesten's excellent article "The Enlightened Diet" from Spirituality & Health magazine:
http://www.spiritualityhealth.com/NMagazine/articles.php?id=531
(free registration required)
an excerpt:
"Not only do virtually all religions and cultural traditions encourage cooking with love, they also seem to integrate intuitively and instinctively what modern researchers are beginning to conjecture: that food empowers us to heal multidimensionally. In other words, we may use our incredible human consciousness and food in four ways: to prevent or reverse physical ailments (biological nutrition); experience the food-mood connection (psychological nutrition); reunite with the spiritual meaning of food (spiritual nutrition); and return to our "social nutrition" heritage (social nutrition). Recognizing all four facets of food allows us to pay attention to the connections between food and body, food and mind, food and soul, and food and social well-being. When we do, we gain a new focus for optimal dietary self-care, which I describe as integrative nutrition."
Most of us do jobs that sooner or later become boring or repetitive or loathsome, but we have to make a living, so we make do until something better comes along, or we retire, or sometimes we die first.
Reviewing anything is one of those jobs that tends to go that way. I should imagine that if I were a television reviewer, I would soon be physically sick at the sight of a TV, and certainly would not want one in my house.
More than 60 years ago, George Orwell discovered the same things about reviewing books for a living, and in an essay called Confessions of a Book Reviewer he wrote:
"...the prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash--though it does involve that, as I will show in a moment--but constantly INVENTING reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feelings whatever..."
"...It is almost impossible to mention books in bulk without grossly overpraising the great majority of them. Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books one does not discover how bad the majority of them are. In much more than nine cases out of ten the only objectively truthful criticism would be "This book is worthless", while the truth about the reviewer's own reaction would probably be "This book does not interest me in any way, and I would not write about it unless I were paid to." But the public will not pay to read that kind of thing. Why should they?"
So, yes, our restaurant reviewer has discovered that what some people might imagine to be exciting and glamorous turns out to be drudgery when you have to do it all the time. Possibly this is why prostitutes don't always go to work with a spring in their step--as the author suggests.
OK, its not very profound, and it is not very novel, but this article provokes a little discussion and puts bread on the author's table, and if we weren't reading this, we would be reading something else of no greater merit.
Actually I would like to see more articles about people's work a la Barbara Ehrenreich, but for obvious reasons most of the articles we see where people write about their own work are written by professional writers. They don't have to take time off work to write, you see.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The Maine fight was supposed to be the dress rehearsal for repealing California's Prop. 8 -- but gay marriage lost
Once one obtains Seriousness credentials in the Washington media, they are irrevocable no matter one's conduct.
Salon headlines in your mailbox
