Taibbi on Humbert (Sort of) TK Newsletter

Wed Aug 11 15:31:59 UTC 2021

I agree that his earlier books were ...v good overall (did not read every
word of every one, just fyi) ....as I indicated as my opinion: he lost his
basic subject so now he has to deal with petty stuff, as I've been told I
do too in a petty way.

Keep on keeping on.

On Wed, Aug 11, 2021 at 11:28 AM Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> Fine for you to assasinate characters but only a dirty scoundrel would
> evaluate the quality of your ideas. If you can’t take it don’t dish it.
> Still you got me to reading some more Taibbi and damn he is good.
> Provacative , probing and also sympathetic and willing to reach out to
> those who have tangled with the powers. I like his writing better than his
> blogging.
>
>
> On Aug 10, 2021, at 12:55 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> This inability to argue without your attempts at character
> assassination (in place of real debating) is why I did not
> bother to engage with you on your long Against the Day posts and
> others.......everyone else is too busy or doesn't care it seems.
>
> 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
>> --
>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>
>> --
>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>
>>
>>
>