Sunday evening roundup

We'll trade ya Joe the Plumber for this guy any day.

There are so many things wrong with this article, I don't even know where to start. Thankfully, this book review in the same section addresses some of the wrongs in the first piece.

Speaking of book reviews, Jill Lepore brilliantly takes on the anti-sanctimommy sanctimommy genre. Here are some brilliant excerpts from the review:

I used to like that conversation. Lately, though, it’s been getting old: all the mothers want forgiveness; all the fathers want applause. A few years back, in “Confessions of a Slacker Mom,” Muffy Mead-Ferro admitted that during her pregnancy she did not actually buy a gizmo that was supposed to pipe Mozart into her belly; in “Dinner with Dad,” Cameron Stracher offered an account of his valiant year of getting home in time for supper. Frankly, I’d just as soon stipulate that most baby gear is worthless, stupid junk and that eating dinner with your kids is really important.

and something I did not know:

In 1969, the Washington Post renamed its “For and About Women” page the Style section; other newspapers followed suit. Parenting blogs like the Times’ Motherlode are basically a throwback.)

and another excerpt:

Within two years of Children’s first issue, Hecht and Littledale had changed the magazine’s name, a decision that made a lot of sense, since all this business about parenthood, then as now, has very little to do with kids. By 1931, Parents’ Magazine boasted two hundred thousand subscribers. Middle-class mothers and fathers turned out to be a very well-defined consumer group, easily gulled into buying almost anything that might remedy their parental deficiencies.

I could go on, but you may as well read the whole thing, while it's publicly available.

Also in the New Yorker, James Wood writes a great opening paragraph:

Sometimes, the soft literary citizens of liberal democracy long for prohibition. Coming up with anything to write about can be difficult when you are allowed to write about anything. A day in which the most arduous choice has been between “grande” and “tall” does not conduce to literary strenuousness. And what do we know about life? Our grand tour was only through the gently borderless continent of Google. Nothing constrains us. Perhaps we look enviously at those who have the misfortune to live in countries where literature is taken seriously enough to be censored, and writers venerated with imprisonment. What if writing were made a bit more exigent for us? What if we had less of everything? It might make our literary culture more “serious,” certainly more creatively ingenious. Instead of drowning in choice, we would have to be inventive around our thirst. Tyranny is the mother of metaphor, and all that.

The book he reviews, from the review, reminds me of "La Disparition" by George Perec (please forgive the missing accent mark), for the occasional breakdown of the fourth wall, but also for the way the novelist embraces the restrictions, real or imagined, to enrich the book.

The book that I have not read, by reminding me of "La Disparition" takes me back, as does the fiction piece in this week's New Yorker, which reminds me of "La Casa de Asterion," a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, which was love at first read. I didn't know what hit me; I don't know if it would have the same effect now-- maybe it's because at the time-- I was a senior in college-- I'd never read anything like it.

It'd be easy to wax nostalgic, look back on those times as the era in which I cared, the era before I was tiresome, before I became that (proverbial) guy. The one who talks about mortgages, paint finishes, plumbing, and so on. Or more to the point, the one who talks about weight loss. I had many worries back in the day--which is why it wouldn't be accurate to look back as if nothing mundane ever infringed the unfettered intellectual utopia that I lived--but I certainly never thought I'd give this much thought to matters of weight. And I know that ten years from now, I'll be amazed that I did.