Taibbi on Humbert (Sort of) TK Newsletter

[Mark Kohut]

Taibbi is as wrong as he has been lately about almost everything. Why is
worth a discussion but not by me today--or probably ever.
TRUTH: .....Humbert's evil is FINALLY being seen by more and more, not what
he writes......mention it
in a room or zoom of women and good readers as I did in my film class about
a good movie influenced by Lolita (w the sexes reversed) .......read the
early intellectuals who wrote of *Lolita* as *a love story*, even in *The
New Yorker.*.......Read the next generation of critical responses, such as
by the real good Michael Wood, who argues that the crucial scene where
Humbert realizes he's a monster doesn't fully work. ......I will refute
narcissitically as well. In my first reading, college, a freshman, but not
for a course, I had serious trouble liking Humbert from the get-go--she is
twelve!---thinking then as stupidly as Taibbi still thinks that he is
supposed to be a likeable narrator....

MT: "No story can survive an unlikeable narrator" ---has he not read enough
great literature or is he just naively stupid? *Journey to the End of
Night, Cabot Wright Begins, American Psycho, Houllebecq and more....*C'mon,
why do we give Taibbi a pass with this stupidity? Because he once pointed
out the real unsaid
in our world? ........Superficial literary twitter of common readers is
full of folks saying, about almost any book...."I didn't like the
character(s)".....so, it was a bad book or not worth finishing......That's
Matt's base of judgment it seems....


"With Cuomo as with anyone else in the Internet age, the important issue
isn’t right or wrong, but whether or not he’ll survive."
Wrong, wrong. See everyone, every almost every woman reacting in real
time......They are all over my twitter....
2 aides resigning with only their own pressure.....(to answer another
overgeneralization of Taibbi's)

AND don't get me started on another writer failing of so many who criticize
social media in his way---with generalizations based on THEIR social
media.....
In its very being, twitter is what you make it; how you curate it....all
these "twitter takes; twitter says"  are simply wrong (unless he's going to
get TOTAL analytics which are still almost impossible to obtain WITH THE
POSITIONS in the tweets known. I. E.. the nature of positive or negative
responses need measured by their content. )....Everyone's twitter;
everyone's Facebook is unique and is curated by one's notions of what one
wants to see/hear)

More bullshit from Taibbi:
"Morality in this sense has become a pass/fail exercise, with everyone
divided into just two categories, viable and disgraced. Which of the two
one lands in depends entirely on how high levels of public disgust and
emotion reach at the peak of viral mania, versus how entrenched the target
is or isn’t. "
Let's see, like General Kelley?..... Steve Bannon?....Sen Frankel?, who
bowed out of the Senate for the good of the party, he said....The Dixie
Chicks....lots of others.....
his line blots out ANY acting on a principled morality, so damn
self-justifyingly cynical; so loaded since, of course, almost every famous
person will fight to keep their fame/power/fortune...I say this is hardly
the "morality' of most people in this world, this country, of course, but
he isn't talking about them,  just generalizing falsely for his paid
articles...
Belated thought: look at his "relative" Glenn Greenwald, fully disgraced
and still viable to refute his two simple-minded categories from another
direction

MT" It’s a quirk of literature that readers will cheer the Acapulco
polysyllable dives of a child rapist but find the same style pompous in the
diary of an inoffensive emigre professor."... ....MORE WRONGNESS: Humbert's
pompousness is raised to the level of pedophilia self-deception while
Pnin's is simply a way of living and being seen. H's charming pompousness
is part of the meaning; Pnin's charmlessness is part of his.

MT "Nabokov, who famously despised the “literature of social intent,” might
have puzzled at the effectiveness of Humbert as a narrator but surely
didn’t worry about it."
MK: Where does he come off with this? Where is the allusion from N's life
or writing  to support this arrogant attempt to read N's baroque mind? The
mind of a hardly predictable genius?.."might have puzzled at"......Yeah,
wrong....my understanding of Nabokov, the man who created and solved chess
puzzles and writing puzzles, is that the usual meaning of "might have
puzzled at" has no traction....he worked without real worry about getting
his words, characterizations, right not, not NOT
"puzzling [as if he wasn't sure; he who said in response to E. M. Forster's
remark that sometimes his characters took on a life of their own, NEVER
his....they are like galley slaves rowing as I want them to...[paraphrase
but the metaphor is exact]....

Poor Matt......who has lost his whole subject matter and has never gotten
literature, it is obvious....

On Mon, Aug 9, 2021 at 9:59 AM Allan Balliett <allan.balliett at gmail.com>
wrote:

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