![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Malcolm Gladwell's capacity to oversimplify the otherwise more aptly stated and to get the rest of the details wrong is slammed in a British article that has its own serious problems but is an excellent example of curmudgeonliness:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/30/malcolm_gladwell_no/print.html
And Slavok Zizek's thought is unrelentingly opposed in The New Republic by Adam Kirsch:
http://www.tnr.com/story_print.html?id=097a31f3-c440-4b10-8894-14197d7a6eef
I am pleased to find someone who takes Zizek seriously enough to find him deeply unfunny and dangerously wrong. Whereas I am shocked by Virginia Heffernan's assault in Sunday's New York Times on Sarah Vowell's The Wordy Shipmates, since I had written a glowing recommendation of the book when Vowell appeared in Atlanta some weeks ago. (Full disclosure: I have been a Sarah Vowell fan since we at Art Papers were getting unsolicited book reviews from an unknown San Francisco reviewer named Sarah Vowell, so I responded to her first piece on NPR with the delight of someone who finds that a long-forgotten relative has made good.)
Heffernan clearly doesn't get what Vowell is about, or more accurately she just doesn't like it, and she's entitled. But she also doesn't comprehend just how out of touch with American intellectual history the alienated-hipster strand of the population is, and/or how disenchanted with the topic of the Puritan inheritance anyone is (e.g., me) who had to read Perry Miller endlessly in graduate seminars. So someone who actually makes it not only palatable but pleasurable again is deserving of gratitude. Except that Heffernan clearly doesn't take pleasure in Vowell's mix of high seriousness and low humor.
And it did my soul good to see the photograph of Julia Kristeva celebrating Claude Lévi-Strauss' hundredth birthday, even if the critics love to hate the Musée du Quai Branly that turns out to owe much to Lévi-Strauss' anthropological celebration of structural difference (one person's difference is another person's exoticism...see Heffernan vs. Vowell, above).
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/30/malcolm_gladwell_no/print.html
And Slavok Zizek's thought is unrelentingly opposed in The New Republic by Adam Kirsch:
http://www.tnr.com/story_print.html?id=097a31f3-c440-4b10-8894-14197d7a6eef
I am pleased to find someone who takes Zizek seriously enough to find him deeply unfunny and dangerously wrong. Whereas I am shocked by Virginia Heffernan's assault in Sunday's New York Times on Sarah Vowell's The Wordy Shipmates, since I had written a glowing recommendation of the book when Vowell appeared in Atlanta some weeks ago. (Full disclosure: I have been a Sarah Vowell fan since we at Art Papers were getting unsolicited book reviews from an unknown San Francisco reviewer named Sarah Vowell, so I responded to her first piece on NPR with the delight of someone who finds that a long-forgotten relative has made good.)
Heffernan clearly doesn't get what Vowell is about, or more accurately she just doesn't like it, and she's entitled. But she also doesn't comprehend just how out of touch with American intellectual history the alienated-hipster strand of the population is, and/or how disenchanted with the topic of the Puritan inheritance anyone is (e.g., me) who had to read Perry Miller endlessly in graduate seminars. So someone who actually makes it not only palatable but pleasurable again is deserving of gratitude. Except that Heffernan clearly doesn't take pleasure in Vowell's mix of high seriousness and low humor.
And it did my soul good to see the photograph of Julia Kristeva celebrating Claude Lévi-Strauss' hundredth birthday, even if the critics love to hate the Musée du Quai Branly that turns out to owe much to Lévi-Strauss' anthropological celebration of structural difference (one person's difference is another person's exoticism...see Heffernan vs. Vowell, above).
