Taibbi on Humbert (Sort of) TK Newsletter

Tue Aug 10 15:30:24 UTC 2021

STOP MISUNDERSTANDING ME.......stop telling me what I am....argue
objectively.

You have never been able to read me correctly......

I LOVE LOLITA.....one of the greatest masterpieces of our time.......I did
not say I agreed with Wood who also thinks it a great slightly-flawed
masterpiece.

On Tue, Aug 10, 2021 at 11:27 AM Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> So you don’t like Taibbi, as you don’t like so many progressive voices who
> fail to simplify the world to CNN morality and Democratic party lies. Not
> too surprising.
>   Unfortunately as a writer with clear bias you are indulging straw man
> logic, reading unexpressed thoughts into the words of the person being
> verbally flogged. Taibbi DOES NOT  say or even imply, " that he (Humbert) is
>  *supposed* to be a likeable narrator…” He says "How can I like Humbert
> Humbert?". And he is saying this after many readings. This is not an
> attempt by Taibbi at a literary critique or essay on Nabokov or Lolita.
> Reflections on Lolita and Nabokov and  what makes an interesting character
> are a personalized and internalized jumping-off point for a discussion of
> media morality and cancel culture and how we treat character issues.
>   You don’t like Lolita but claim to revere Nabokov, I don’t like either
> and don’t feel required to do so to be literate. Taibbi does like the
> writer and Lolita which is only one of Nabokov’s works that have a serious
> fascination with sex with children. Lolita drew the fascination of  the
> american letters community as an inquiry into character, into maleness,
> into manipulative games, and into language itself. It simultaneously drew a
> huge crowd as something with the appearance of sophisticated eroticism,
> thus  enlarging the interest of the literati, and also drawing in a lot of
> the playboy crowd and young men and women who wanted to be in the know.  I
> would suggest part of Taibbi’s use of this work was to show both sides of
> the drawing power of sex: first,  as a common ground of public fascination,
> and second as a common ground of moral debate and how that fascination has
> become so central to public morality while the planet burns, nations are
> starved, the treasury is looted, and insanely immoral wars are propagated
> by the same media.
>   To me the heart of the article is the moral comparison between the
> questionable substance of the sex allegations against Cuomo versus the much
> more devious and destructive isssue with Covid in nursing homes. He is not
> negating  that groping and abusing power is behavior that cannot be
> tolerated, but asking why are far more violent and destructive actions so
> easily tolerated?  Here he is talking about something in this weird
> political culture that is substantive and  worth writing about. The essay
> was far more interesting  and nuanced than your petty attack.
>   In the end I think you only succed in illustrating Taibbi’s point about
> the oversimplifications of cancel culture and skewed moral judgements.
> "Poor Matt”? His career as a writer is impressive because he is funny
> thoughtful and able to clarify complex realities. I doubt he qualifies as
> poor in any sense.
>
>
> On Aug 10, 2021, at 5:05 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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:
>
>
>
> https://taibbi.substack.com/p/tk-newsletter-on-good-people-and?r=2pty3&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=email
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