Descent of the Species

"Out there it’s the 1990s, but in this house, it’s 1954.” Mentioned, sarcastically, by the mentally ill Maureen Dowd of the new York Times,


That same 1954 when America was on top of the world, when a man could support his family on one salary alone, when our demographic was 90% white and mostly civilized, when drug use was the habit of a few jazz musicians in NYC and almost no one else, when women wanted to be women and weren't trying to play badmitten on a tennis court, when black people had not yet been thrown into an unwinable economic competition with white people and their crime rate was only two or three times as lofty as that of Caucasians? When a fair number of their children had an identifiable father and immigration was restricted to people who could have a reasonable expectation of adopting western values, when we had Faulkner and Hemingway instead of the banality of chick lit and preening lady authors who know how to toe the p.c. party line, when we were the most admired people on earth instead of the most detested, when our schools actually conveyed knowledge instead of approved platitudes, when our most emminent newspaper hadn't yet overdosed on anti-white agitprop, when someone like our extraordinarily sophisticated Ms. Dowd would have been seen for what she is - a person who had rather have a kidney replacement than to miss a Woody Allen film?
Better to have one day of life in 1954 than immortality in the world of The New York Times.

Infinite Jest by David Wallace

Having lately invested in a paperback edition of David Wallace’s Infinite Jest, a 1,037-page text in small print (a length, I’ve repeatedly been told, is not publishable), I seek suggestions on how to approach the thing. Dave Eggers has said it required him a month to read it, but at my age I expect it will need much longer. My fear, of course, is that it will turn out to be a pretentious production, a display of cuteness designed to prove how informed the author was, how reckless and sophisticated, and how the possession of genius empowered him to ignore the value of being understandable.
My great hope, on the other hand, is that the book is as wonderful as so many critics have claimed, and that this author’s genius is not merely putative, but real. In any event I will be giving the novel my best attention for as long as I find it useful to bear with it, and will report back at intervals.
I should also say that I am dismayed by the lack of attention that has been given to this writer’s suicide, far less notice indeed than what has been given to Paris Hilton’s hairdo. The decay of the West – I’ll be reporting on that, too.