Review of the New York Review of Books, Continued

New theme! I'm moving away from doing the bloggy and sporadic Director's Comment Track on The Criterion DVD For My Own Unreleased Autobiopic and in a new direction that will hopefully attract more elderly intellectual readers who personally know Joan Didion. Or something. What I'm saying is that I know I've linked to the New York Review of Books a lot. Or a lot relative to the total number of actual linkings-to or writing-of anything, here.

But between this piece by Mark Lilla and the excerpt from Tony Judt's Ill Fares The Land that I linked to in the pre-honeymoon (PH) period, I think I can justify it. I spent my honeymoon enjoying Italy and being with my wife and being surrounded by expertly prepared food served to people who really just care an incredible lot about it, but I also did read the Judt book, and it's pretty amazingly great -- a simultaneously very simple and very profound look at what's rotten in the way we think about and talk about and govern ourselves. In short, the sort of thing you'd really enjoy reading in a clothing store in Italy while your wife tries on clothes. Hold on... I just found out that blurb will be on the back of the paperback edition! Awesome, I'm honored.

Here's Lilla on the Tea Party Thing. I'll admit that a NYRB take on this could be witheringly out of touch and UWS and goonishly elitist, but Lilla is not. He dismisses, as he kind of must, but he does so with a depth of perspective that you occasionally don't get from, you know, Elite Cosmopolitan Intellectuals:

But what happens after the class president is sworn in and the homecoming queen is crowned? The committees dissolve and normal private life resumes. And that, I suspect, is what will happen to the Tea Party organizations: after tasting a few symbolic victories they will likely dissolve. This is not only because, being ideologically allergic to hierarchy of any kind, they still have no identifiable leadership. It is because they have no constructive political agenda, though the right wing of the Republican Party would dearly love to attach its own to them. But the movement only exists to express defiance against a phantom threat behind a real economic and political crisis, and to remind those in power that they are there for one thing only: to protect our divine right to do whatever we damn well please. This message will be delivered, and then the messengers will go home. Every man a Cincinnatus.

The whole deal is worth reading. Mo' professional stuff coming once my body re-acclimates to being on this particular continent.

Groping The Intangibles

So, I owe like eight people I'm already friends with an explanation/apology for a week generally absent of any blogging at all. Or... even that is maybe grandiose? It is, isn't it. The Joe McEwing picture is suddenly even feeling grandiose. Perspective check!

Okay, apparently I'm still more relevant than Super Joe, which is good. Anyway, what had happened was that I was coming up with all these things I wanted to write -- in no particular order, the weird rightness of a couple pieces at Gawker that finally barfed on The Hills and the weird wrongness of one that destroyed some asshole lady's life, most recently, and also some other stuff about this incredibly terrible MIA video (you can read most of what I would've written down in the comments, although I'd add that it's hilarious that Costa-Gavras' kid is also hyphenating his semi-name) and a ridiculously ill-conceived thinky thing that I promise will never write that was going to be called "The Tears in Philip Glass's Eyes" -- and then writing other stuff that I will hopefully be paid for eventually. And I did some invoicing. And there was the day gig, which is an apocalypse of ridiculousness in a dozen different ways, but which I am not going to get into here because that would just be a stupid way to lose a gig. But all of that is now more or less wrapped -- I mean, the day job is forever and eternity, but the fun stuff is wrapped -- and I've got a Slate piece coming up I'm very happy with and a honeymoon I'm looking forward to and I should probably go to bed. But so yes: this is going to get quiet after probably another post or two this weekend, for like two weeks. Just rest assured that I'll be somewhere in Italy, drinking wine and eating things with, like, stomach or duck or whatever those guys serve me in them, and spending some time with my wife. Whom you probably know from her ace fetching abilities, and who I actually used to hang out with quite a bit before she had to do this big gala thing and other stuff.

But yeah. I'll be away for a bit. Not starting now, but starting soon. So be prepared for, like, a post about what I'm going to read while I'm in Italy -- this and this and hopefully a novel or so -- and maybe another INSTANT CLASSIC about ramps or something, and then for some silence. It's cool. There's plenty of other stuff on the Internet. If you're having trouble getting up the willpower to commit suicide, I recommend The Drudge Report.