Word: reader
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When a crowd armed with donuts and taco sauce gathered at the San Francisco Chronicle's office last Thursday, they were prepared for spicy, sugary violence over the loss of their favorite daily comic strip. A reader poll had shown Bill Griffith's "Zippy the Pinhead" to be unpopular despite having first appeared as a daily in San Francisco over fifteen years ago. Had the city changed so much that it could no longer tolerate the strip's non-conformist structure and idiosyncratic ramblings? Most of America doesn't understand "Zippy," the best daily comic strip printed today. Here...
...tell stories," he told the New York Times. "I don't discuss my documents. It almost gets to the point where, how much is the reader going to take?" Not as much as Ambrose, evidently. If he has a point, it seems to be that his narrative momentum would have been impeded by the use of quotation marks or by a completely original text--a defense a shoplifter might use when explaining that he would have paid for his stolen items, but that would have broken his stride on the way out of the store...
...that he only co-wrote or contributed to (1991’s Breaking Bread with bell hooks, 1995’s Jews and Blacks: Let the Healing Begin with Michael Lerner, and several more), or books made up of previously published materials (Race Matters, the recent The Cornel West Reader), or compilations of interviews and conversations (1997’s Restoring Hope). And there may be a kernel of truth in President Summers’ supposed claim that since coming to Harvard, West has focused more on polemics and personal ruminations than on serious scholarship—in fact...
Cornel West is above such pettiness, though—he is shielded not only by his manifest brilliance, but by what an essay in The Cornel West Reader calls his “ego-deflating humility.” This humility is on prominent display at (where else?) cornelwest.com, which introduces the professor’s CD, Sketches of My Culture, with the announcement that “in all modesty, this project constitutes a watershed moment in musical history.” A lesser man, having produced such a watershed work, might have been tempted to caper and preen...
...even deeper fact of sarcasm is that it gives the reader some measure of interest and opens writing up to interpretation—a side effect unknown to funereal earnestness. Whether the readers laugh, nod or wring out angry letters to the editor, they have learned something about themselves. One might argue that journalism should be unbending and obvious, that we don’t read The New York Times to learn about ourselves. Perhaps sarcasm is strictly the province of novelists and playwrights. But might we include columnists under the sarcasm umbrella? My own published sarcasm gives...