Something put me in mind of Hazlitt’s famous Letter to William Gifford this morning – so I thought I might as well give you a bit of the flavour of it. It’s a permanent, settled grievance of mine that Hazlitt is so little-known. I think he’s the single most inexplicably obscure writer in English. He ought to be at least as famous as Orwell and far more so than Lamb or Carlyle. He’s an absolutely brilliant, dazzling writer, and he’s no slouch as a thinker, either.

The letter to Gifford starts off briskly:

Sir, You have an ugly trick of saying what is not true of any one you do not like; and it will be the object of this

Corruption in US politics is a hardy perennial issue. Reliable, sturdy, always there; something to count on in a disconcerting world. This is, of course, because nothing is ever done about it, and the people who ought to care about it mostly don’t, and the people who ought to pay a penalty for engaging in it don’t, and the people who ought to be paying attention mostly aren’t, and the people who ought to be bringing it to the attention of the people who ought to be paying attention and ought to care mostly aren’t. It’s all a bit discouraging, frankly. Or to put it another way, it’s completely disgusting and infuriating, and an outrage, and absurd, and blindingly obviously … Read the rest

This is funny. Hilarious, in fact. A blogger and frequent blog-commenter who is well-known for an unattractive combination of heavy sarcasm and rudeness made safe by anonymity, tries another bit of heavy sarcasm that falls rather flat, and contradicts himself in the process. Compare three statements:

“High-Caste Hindu”: Irreverently Humorous or Casually Colonialist and Racist? Chun Informs, You Decide

Do you assume that Spivak calling herself this would make it any less casually colonialist or racist (if in fact that’s the proper description–about which I, as I wrote, have no opinion)?

I find your points to be cogent, but I believe you must detect a patronizing note in Inglis’s description.

Ah. You decide. I have no opinion. But on the … Read the rest

This article starts off with a pretty bizarre story.

The other day, I was reading an interview with Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean in Newsweek when I had to stop and check that it was indeed Newsweek and not, say, Christianity Today. Yes, it was indeed Newsweek. And, after a series of questions about a variety of public policy issues, Dean was asked, out of the clear blue, the following question: “Do you see Jesus Christ as the son of God and believe in him as the route to salvation and eternal life?”

Really? Really?? I never read Newsweek, so I don’t know, but that is such a weird question that it strains credulity. I mean, was … Read the rest

John Holbo has a very sly post on the tireless Bad Writing subject on his blog. He read the first three issues of the PMLA – Proceedings of the Modern Language Association – for 2003 cover to cover, twice. (Then he had a complete blood transfusion and is well on the way to recovery – now cut that out.) And he has some thoughts.

First he quotes Judith Butler explaining why bad writing is necessary and good:

The accused then responds that “if what he says could be said in terms of ordinary language he would probably have done so in the first place.” Understanding what the critical intellectual has to say, Marcuse goes on, “presupposes the collapse and invalidation

One thing (but not the only thing) that prompted this train of thought (or perhaps bus of rumination or minivan of woolgathering or rollerskate of idle daydreaming) was something I read a few days ago in another of Dwight Macdonald’s letters, this one from January 1946, when Macdonald was editing his own magazine Politics.

I suppose you’ve read by now Simone Weil’s article on The Iliad. The response to it has surprised me; I thought it was a great political article, dealing with the moral questions implicit in the terrible events one reads about in every day’s newspaper, which was why I played it up so prominently in the issue…Nothing I’ve printed yet seems to have made so