It's not that they don't know what good writing is, it's that good writing is effete and liberal, to be distrusted in an age of chest-beating, pants-drenching masculinity. There's a time to think and a time to act, and this is not a time to think. It's never, ever a time to think, come to think of it.
Present company excepted, I likes me some Matt Taibbi. He often lays the HST schtick on too thick, and he's usually quite sloppy, heavyhanded and lazy. But when he connects - most often when writing about the Bullshit Moose, who he truly loathes - it's like sweet Babka.
"I have been reading the life of Thomas Carlyle, this unconscious and involuntary farce, this heroic-moralistic interpretation of dyspeptic states."
-F. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
Two essays, of a kind: Mark Twain's evisceration of Fenimore Cooper, and Anthony Lane's readthrough of the NYT bestseller list from 1994.
Twain's you really have to read. I've never read a more complete destruction of anything (person, place, or idea) in print.
My three favorite writers on the web are Wolcott, TBogg and our gracious host. I won't flatter you by quoting your own words back to you, Roy, so here's a favorite Wolcott takedown:
"Roger L. Simon, international man of muffler repair, recently floated a lead trial balloon urging the divestiture of Google stock, saying that he'd sell his stock if he owned any, depending on climate conditions, solar-lunar conjunctions, and the elasticity of his garters. Despite his bold, unequivocal stand, there are those who doubt his commitment to selling stock he doesn't own contingent on certain variables."
Oh, and this: "Michael Ledeen, who was the only kid in elementary school with a Machiavelli lunchbox, is peeved."
Come to think of it, "Machiavelli Lunchbox" is a pretty good name for a band.
Oh, they (PJM) might understand what it is you're trying to say. They might even enjoy it as well, but they'll certainly never write about it. That is, unless one were to go after the smallest possible target audience in this country.
While I know this borders on "economic", as I am going to throw out some numbers, statistics, etc., just look at it as building an argument. Certainly I could infuse it with a little invective, but then it wouldn't be fit to print. Take a look:
http://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/index.as...l.asp&
PageId=16
roughly only 13%, or aprox. 28 million persons, of the US adult population are "Proficient" readers. And that little statistical group is the smallest categorey. Even coming in with fewer people than the "Below Basic" group, the least proficient of the bunch.
Thus, only a small segment of the population is ever even going to understand your wonderful wit and play of the pen. This is a niche market. Your big publications, papers, news magazines, etc., are going to target the widest audience possible. As such, I'm afraid you folks may never get the satisfaction you desire by reading a Time magazine or the New York Times. I'm sure you have all heard about how publications like Time magazine write at about an 8th grade level, at best. And so their writers all exist within that realm too. Or maybe they just fake it. Either way you end up with the same crappy results.
This is just literacy. Math skills, logic skills, are even more appalling. I think the prime example is the Gore vs. Bush debate in 2000. Watching Gore run over, in some detail, tax policies and budgets, while all Bush could muster in rebuttal was "fuzzy maths"!?! I thought for sure this guy's goose was cooked. Ah, not so. Foir afterwards I watched the talking heads begin to try to dissect what GOre was saying, only to watch their eyse glaze over. Shortly followed by brilliant recognition as they scrambled to Bush's position: fuzzy math indeed!
Nonetheless, you'll never win them over and they'll never win you over. Unless you decide to lose the fancy words and phrasing. In the meantime, we all get to talk amongst ourselves.
Nice, amusing stuff, but sort of mild-mannered, no? You'd almost think we'd lost the art.
The best I've recently encountered is from David Rakoff's Don't Get Too Comfortable, in which he covers Parisian fashion shows and is told by one Karl Lagerfeld, "What can you write that hasn't been written already?" In reply, he essays this:
"He's absolutely right. I have no idea... Lagerfeld's powdered white ponytail has dusted the shoulders of his suit with what looks like dandruff but isn't. Also, not yet having undergone his alarming weight loss, and seated on a tiny velvet chair, with his large doughy rump dominating the miniature piece of furniture like a loose, flabby, ass-flavored muffin overrisen from its pan, he resembles a Daumier caricature of some corpulent, inhumane oligarch drawn sitting on a commode, stuffing his greedy throat with the corpses of dead children, while from his other end he shits out huge, malodorous piles of tainted money. How's that for new and groundbreaking, Mr. L?"
I think the best invective is cumulative.
If typical scholarly theses are nets to catch the wind, Quinones's thesis is a stupendous vacuum into which rushes the accumulated hot air of ten thousand graduate seminars."
[snip]
"No bromide this!" exults Quinones on another page, having emitted another bromide. No stuffed shirt he! Sex jingles like loose change in the pockets of his imbecile metaphors.
[snip]
How did he fill all those pages? He has read many books and taken many notes (out of an "inner psychic need," no doubt, as he says of Othello in another connection), and much of his own distended volume is synopsis and paraphrase (excelsior and styrofoam). His thesis is vague enough to allow him to drift off in almost any direction till he jerks himself upright with an admonitory pretense of having been on course all the time, and who's to say since what's the course? He seems never to have questioned a literary judgment uttered by a full professor: all the classroom chestnuts are here, rolling off the page in a steady mindless rattle. He has no ideas of his own, and not more than two or three of anybody else's...
Meet Marvin Mudrick, the man who once summed up this nation's popular literature in one ringing phrase: "I Fucked Smokey the Bear for the FBI and Found God." The excerpts are from "Books Are Not Life -- But Then What Is?" a collection of his book reviews from the Hudson Review.
Christ, "invective" is a better word than "snark."
How did we go so wrong?
I blame the Democrats.
I remembered this bit from Kurt Vonnegut:
“I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show. I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: ‘C-Students from Yale.’”
When looking for it, I also came across a good one from Twain, which some of you may appreciate:
“Every time I read Pride & Prejudice I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”
This isn't literary invective, but one of the sharpest historical retorts I've come across, read yesterday on a gay Zen Buddhist's knitting blog, no less:
"...this reminds me of my favorite anecdote about Mary Garden, an opera singer who in the early years of the 20th century had the sort of fame we now reserve for giant creative talents like Lindsay Lohan. Garden was a hottie, to put it mildly. At a party Chauncey Depew took a look at her plunging neckline and asked, "Tell me, Miss Garden, what's holding up that dress?" To which she replied, "Your age and my discretion."
It's crude, I know, but I've been rather fond of this for a while:
http://fuckthesouth.com/
For invective, one of my favorites is (was?) the late Professor Morton Smith, whose eviscerations of bad scholarship always delighted me at the same time that his mostly good scholarship informed. In a review of a collection of conference papers, he singled out one as written in a language that he believed the author thought to be English.
Gore Vidal is good too. In a piece from the 60s on Henry Miller, he noted, fairly mildly, that he doubted the absolute truth of Miller's sexo-autobiographical novels, since apparently no one in Miller's life ever responded to his rhapsodic monologues with "Henry, you are full of shit."
I may not even like everyone I mention, or agree with what they say, but I still think it's good:
Dorothy Parker:
This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
Mamie Van Doren (about Warren Beatty):
He's the type of man who will end up dying in his own arms.
Jim Hightower:
If ignorance ever goes to $40 a barrel, I want drilling rights on George Bush's head.
Margo Asquith on Winston Churchill:
He would kill his own mother just so that he could use her skin to make a drum to beat his own praises.
Truman on Nixon:
He's one of the few in the history of this country to run for high office talking out of both sides of his mouth at the same time and lying out of both sides.
Martin Luther on Henry VIII:
[He is] a pig, an ass, a dunghill, the spawn of an adder, a basilisk, a lying buffoon, a mad fool with a frothy mouth.
Disraeli to O'Connell (and, basically my own ancestors:
Yes, I am a Jew, and when the ancestors of the right honourable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.
I would be shocked almost into cardiac arrest if Roy, and probably a good number of my friends on this side of the bar, don't own THE PORTABLE CURMUDGEON, Jonathan Winokur's compilation of nasty bon mots. Stop what you're doing and go get it now if you don't have it.
But anyway, one of my favorites, is Winston Churchill on Clement Atlee: "He is a sheep in sheep's clothing."
But anyway, one of my favorites, is Winston Churchill on Clement Atlee: "He is a sheep in sheep's clothing."
Churchill was known to drain a glass or two and, after one particularly convivial evening, he chanced to encounter Miss Bessie Braddock, a Socialist member of the House of Commons, who, upon seeing his condition, said, "Winston, you're drunk." Mustering all his dignity, Churchill drew himself up to his full height, cocked an eyebrow and rejoined, "Shove it up your ass, you ugly cunt."
More stolen from an old National Lampoon here.
After one of Harding's speeches at a Press Club, Heywood Broun rose and shouted "Author, author!"
Short and pithy is all that stays in my head. Moses Hadad: "This book fills a much-needed gap." Robert Benchley: "It was one of those plays where, unfortunately, the actors enunciated very clearly." Dorothy Parker, "The affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all of literature."
And perhaps the all-time greatest insult, from Dr. Johnson: "Sir, your wife, under the pretense of running a bawdy house, is a receiver of stolen goods."
"Poor George. He can't help it, he was born with a silver foot in his mouth."
Sleep well, Annie. Your body may have given up, but invective lives forever.
Why do the trolls never participate in the fun and games at this blog, but only in the seriousness? They should get out more, I guess.
Both of these I attribute to Ann Richards, God rest her soul: "He was born with a silver foot in his mouth" and "Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple." Both were used in reference to various members of the Bush family. (And also, I think that Barry Switzer is the person to whom the second is really attributed, but I know Ann used it at some point.)
Who mentioned Dorothy Parker? Would it have been worth being Dorothy Parker, and all that entailed, to be so quotable?
"This is not a book to be set aside lightly. It should be thrown aside with great force."
But that was written. She was verbally witty beyond reason. Told of someone she disdained that the woman was always kind to her inferiors, Parker responds "Where does she find them?"
To Parker: "I won't be able to come to your party, I can't bear fools."
Parker: "That's strange, your mother could."
I mean, get out of here with that. Not only do you have to think of the perfect line, you also have to have the guts (or absence of tact, if you like) to deliver it -- right then.
I was going to nominate my own lancing of Mark Steyn's most recent racist boil -
http://
nathanwhitlock.blogspot.c...touchiness.html
- but then I noticed you said "the exalted," so that leaves Steyn out.
Though he has become a little creaky lately, James Wood was for a while the Brill building of contemporary literary invective, churning out the hits.
Well, I hear that Laurel Canyon
is full of famous stars,
But I hate them worse than lepers
and I'll kill them in their cars
Neil Young: Revolution Blues
I've always been partial to Thomas Jefferson's observation of King George III upon meeting him:
"I saw at once the ulcerations in the mind of that mulish being...".
Woody Allen in Bananas:
“It's a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham.”
Definitely a case where the subject or politics do not matter.
.
"Had you 'artists' had a part in the decoration of the Sistine Chapel, it would have ended up looking like a particularly vulgar train terminal."
Ignatius from John Kennedy Toole's "A Confederacy of Dunces"
pg 256.
One of my favorite literary pieces, filled with invective.
Bob Dylan:
"I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes.
Then you'd know what a drag it is to see you."
I've always admired Hunter S. Thompson's eulogy for Richard Nixon as one of the most savage things written in real time about a public person and widely published:
If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.
Truly beautiful.
A great collection of arts-related insults can be found in Nicholas Slonimsky's "Lexicon of Musical Invective," a collection of bad reviews of composers from Beethoven through Boulez. I also like the closing Invecticon, an index organized alphabetically by insult (e.g., Abortion, sonic).
Peter David's response to a rude letter writer is a personal fave: "You, sir, have a chip on your shoulder, and the source of wood appears to be directly above your neck."
A classic truth comes from the W C Fields film "You Can't Cheat an Honest Man." Oddly enough, it isn't Fields but Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy at a society party. Edgar is excited saying, "Look at these people, Charlie. This is the cream of society. Do you know why they call it the cream of society, Charlie? It's because cream rises to the top."
"Yeah, so does the scum," Charlie replies.
We need to recognize that fact more often and much more publicly.
Here's some invective. I knew Walter Goodman's son. The elder Goodman was fairly conservative but (by NYT standards) a good writer. On the other hand ... Well, long ago I spent a few months working for the younger Goodman, who was a moderate liberal of pretty much my sort but also (here comes the invective) a childish idiot and complete fucking douchebag.
Not bad, huh? Well, no, maybe it's nothing special. No wit, no originality, no rumpty-dumpty up-and-down rhythm. And yet it's still completely adequate to the subject.
Teddy Roosevelt once said of some guy, "I could carve a better man out of a banana," or somesuch. I'm not sure who he was referring to, but I like to think it was on of George Bush's bewhiskered ancestors. Cornelius Herbert Jedediah Bush, perhaps. The Bushes are old money. I bet they had a few worthless ne'er-do-wells pissing away bits of their friend's family fortunes on absinthe and a string of failed businesses even back then. There was probably a member of the Bush clan stinking up some small, minor Cabinet post in the McKinley administration. Harding probably made some Bush or another ambassador to some particularly worthless island.
Those NatLamp revamps of Winston Churchill are fun. In the same spirit, but supposedly accurate, we have Billy Wilder's comeback to Louis B. Mayer. This is from "City of Nets" by Otto Friedrich.
Friedrich says that when "Sunset Boulevard" premiered, Mayer stormed up to Wilder in the lobby. "You have disgraced the industry that fed you," Mayer said, or something like that.
Wilder thought over his options for a reply and then said, "Go fuck yourself."
Some of this is pretty good, considering the source. Snarky writers are a dime a dozen compared to snarky politicians.
Connoisseurs of fine music and invective owe it to themselves to acquire a copy of "Lexicon of Musical Invective: Critical Assaults on Composers Since Beethoven's Time" by Nicolas Slonimsky. You won't believe some of the curmugeonly things that were said about music that we now regard as masterpieces. Here is my favorite:
"The whole orchestral part of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony I found very wearying indeed. Several times I had great difficulty in keeping awake...It was a great relief when the choral part was arrived at, of which I had great expectations. It opened with eight bars of a commonplace theme, very much like Yankee Doodle...As for this part of the famous Symphony, I regret to say that it appeared to be made up of the strange, the ludicrous, the abrupt, the ferocious, and the screechy, with the slightest possible admixture, here and there, of an intelligible melody. As for following the words printed in the program, it was quite out of the question, and what all the noise was about, it was hard to form any idea. The general impression it left on me is that of a concert made up of Indian war-whoops, and angry wildcats." (The Orchestra, London, June 20, 186
The jovian heights of Churchill are fine, but coming back to plebeian invective regarding current events, even some of the anonymous posters among us can do pretty well. One JulliaAnn posted this at Dkos:
"...the GOP is the party of fearful and perverted people who get their jollies from pissing on others. These are the brownshirts, the psychologically unbalanced, the racists, the uncool kids, the thin-lipped fat white bad dancers, the authoritarians, the C students, the control freaks, and the dispossessed -- all joined together in one political party dedicated to sticking it to whomever they can momentarily feel better than. I can look at the Republicans in my own family and see the truth: these are people who are more afraid and less educated, and willing to do almost anything to be "on top" because they spent a pivotal time in their lives feeling unimportant. They need counseling, but they won't get it...these people are dangerous -- at every time and in every place they have appeared in history."
Spartakus:
Invective is only satisfying if the author of it has a clue. The dude you quoted was harshing on Beethoven's Ninth, for fuck's sake.
Dorothy Parker on Katherine Hepburn's acting: "She ran the gamut of emotions from A to B"
Cartoon caption by Thurber: "Where did you get those big blue eyes and that little tiny mind?"
And a great insult of Elvis in "Time Magazine," which I have not been able to track down. Something about his appearance as a squiggly eyed creature in a film.
Writers used to be much better at insults than they are today.
I read a comment in one of the blogs that I think belongs.
When Tom Delay compared himself to Jesus by saying something like, "I'm in good company. They persecuted Christ too." The response was, "If Tom Delay is Jesus, I'm voting for Barabas."
Speaking of pithy:
Wagner's music is better than it sounds. (Twain)
If the Republicans will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them. (Stevenson)
Or this sweet plum from Phil Hartman channeling Frank Sinatra:
You don't scare me. I got chunks 'a guys like you in my stool!
Mencken was a master, and Dorothy Parker, as others have pointed out, was hard to beat at this. (Her pal Benchley, too). I like her Constant Reader column wherein she reviews Milne:
It is that word 'hummy,' my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up.
Or the biography of one of America's first mass-media evangelist whackos:
Well, Aimee Semple McPherson has written a book. And were you to call it a little peach, you would not be so much as scratching its surface. It is the story of her life, and it is called 'In the Service of the King', which title is perhaps a bit dangerously suggestive of a romantic novel. It may be that this autobiography is set down in sincerity, frankness and simple effort. It may be, too, that the Statue of Liberty is situated in Lake Ontario.
BTW, has anyone here gotten the complete New Yorker DVD's? If so, how do you manage it? I'm afraid to get it because I barely get anything done as it is.
An excellent post. I had a quote that's basically an invective on the invective. I really don't have the time to look it up but something along the lines of "invective is the last refuge of a [mindless] scoundrel" or something like that. It's actually a critique of the Mencken's and late 19th/early 20th century journalism styles that helped usher it in. Mencken's certainly quotable but not the most substantive chap. Though by contemporary journalistic standards the guy's a fricken genius.
Basically, the sentiment is that when people resort solely to invective they've essentially stopped thinking. It was written as a response to the obvious post WW-2 decline in great literature (and not by a the west is in decline prophet of my ilk). Captures the sentiment that everything that could be said has been said and everything that could be tried has been tried. So new ideas are greeted with skepticism and old ideas are cast off immediately.
I think that's why your more talented writers, such as yourself, keep a blog rather than write anything that might add to the human experience. Other than your core faithful, who in this day and age would read anybody else with something to say anyhow? Especially when its unoriginal and reliant solely on invective.
If I cared I'd look it up and not build a whole analysis on a quote I don't know. Oh well. Time's too short and I'm off to church.
I've seen multiple attributions, but it goes something like this; "Egad, sir. I do not know whether you should die of the pox or the noose."
And the response, "That should depend sir on whether I embrace your mistress or your principles."
"If I cared I'd look it up and not build a whole analysis on a quote I don't know. Oh well. Time's too short and I'm off to church."
Who knew Conservative Guy was actually Jonah Goldberg? Not me, I'll freely admit.
I think that's why your more talented writers, such as yourself, keep a blog rather than write anything that might add to the human experience.
Ahem.
I'm sure, though, both of us have rich lives outside that small portion visible from a browser window.
Dame Edna Everage to Melvyn Bragg;
"Don't write any more, Melvyn dear. Give us a chance to catch up."
Hey Cretinous Guy,
When your at church, be sure to root for Jesus, the tortured guy up there on the cross, and not the torture-lovin' Romans, okay? Some other members of your party seem a little, uh, confused about that. Thanks!
These is perhaps the greatest comments thread I've ever read. But then I've always loved invective, vituperation, execrations snark, et cetera. Mencken, Parker, Hunter Thompson are saints to me. David Rakoff shows some extreme promise in his take on Lagerfeld too. Ouch! Don't sugarcoat it there, Rakoff, tell us how you feel!
One of the many problems thinking people have is that they often confuse the respect they ought to have for people's rights with respect they ought to grant those people themseves only when they've earned it. The loathsome should not be treated with respect; they should be pelted with opprobium, so as to discourage their despicable behavior. This is called Civilization.
Here is my snark for the day, or perhaps for the last five years or so:
W took office a crooked, stupid, cowardly, sadistic lout, and then a freak of history handed him absolute power. As Lord Acton might have anticipated, the crack-like catalyst of all this power has further degraded W's character, to the point where he is now criminally insane.
Look out America, he is capable of Anything or at least, as some hated Frenchman said, "any crime that does not require courage."
For those of you who like to read the masters (of invective) I suggest 'The Book of Insults' by Nancy McPhee. One of my favorites from there, once again on Thomas Carlyle,
"It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle marry one another and so make only two people miserable instead of four."
-Samuel Butler
It was written as a response to the obvious post WW-2 decline in great literature..
Obvious? Really? Nabokov in Engliish? The second half of Borges' career (all of which was unavailable to the English-only speaker until the 60s)? Pynchon, Garcia-Marquez?
Just what is it with you "conservative" fellows and tossed-off anti-modernism? It is possible to oppose this stuff politically or emotionally or whatever and still know something about it, y'know.
To steal one, Conservative Guy is as clever as he is charming.
Max Beerbohm:
Letter to Thank Author for Inscribed Copy of BookHere's the whole thing.
Dear Mr. Emanuel Flower,
It was kind of you to think of sending me a copy of your new book. It would have been kinder still to think again and abandon that project. I am a man of gentle instincts, and do not like to tell you that A Flight into Arcady (of which I have skimmed a few pages, thus wasting two or three minutes of my not altogether worthless time) is trash. On the other hand, I am determined that you shall not be able to go around boasting to your friends, if you have any, that this work was not condemned, derided, and dismissed by your sincere well-wisher,
Wrexford Cripps.
Letter to Member of Parliament Unseated At General Election
Dear Mr. Pobsby-Burford,
Though I am myself an ardent Tory, I cannot but rejoice in the crushing defeat you have just suffered in West Odgetown. There are moments when political conviction is overborne by personal sentiment; and this is one of them. Your loss of the seat that you held is the more striking by reason of the splendid manner in which the northern and eastern divisions of Odgetown have been wrested from the Liberal Party. The great bulk of the newspaper-reading public will be puzzled by your extinction in the midst of our party's triumph. But then, the great mass of the newspaper-reading public has not met you. I have. You will probably not remember me. You are the sort of man who would not remember anybody who might not be of some definite use to him. Such, at least, was one of the impressions you made on me when I met you last summer at a dinner given by our friends the Pelhams. Among the other things in you that struck me were the blatant pomposity of your manner, your appalling flow of cheap platitudes, and your hoggish lack of ideas. It is such men as you that lower the tone of public life. And I am sure that in writing to you thus I am but expressing what is felt, without distinction of party, by all who sat with you in the late Parliament.
The one person in whose behalf I regret your withdrawal into private life is your wife, whom I had the pleasure of taking in to the aforesaid dinner. It was evident to me that she was a woman whose spirit was well-nigh broken by her conjunction with you. Such remnants of cheerfulness as were in her I attributed to the Parliamentary duties which kept you out of her sight for so very many hours daily. I do not like to think of the fate to which the free and independent electors of West Odgetown have just condemned her. Only, remember this: chattel of yours though she is, and timid and humble, she despises you in her heart. I am, dear Mr. Pobsby-Burford, Yours very truly,
Harold Thistlake
And when they come, our most recent trolls only pooh-pooh our little game, and say that it isn't worthy of their lofty time. I'm serious, sir, (and I say that with all the weight of Conservative Guy's arguments) other than the not-so-occasional cry of "Treason!" or the backhanded compliments to our gracious host, do you have wit or passion enough in your heart to have a favorite insult? Or is shitflinging about as high on the ladder as you aspire to?
A couple of my favorites from the Evolution debates in NYRB in the 90s:
Stephen J. Gould, responding to Daniel Dennett's petulant defense of Darwin's Dangerous Idea after Gould's detailed rebuttal of all of the book's major argumets:
"Right after King Henry's stirring St. Crispin's day speech in the battle of Agincourt, Shakespeare supplies some humorous relief, as Falstaff's former servant Pistol extracts a ransom from a cowardly French soldier by loud bluff and posturing. Pistol's own servant then makes a famous observation: "The saying is true-the empty vessel makes the greatest sound".
Dennett's singularly contentless commentary reminded me of this motto and its corollary, "When you have nothing to say, say it louder" - a tactic that got 450 prophets of Baal into terminal trouble with Elijah."
Gould again, responding to Steven Pinker's confusing defense of evolutionary psychology:
"If we define poetic justice as defeat by one's own favored devices - Robespierre before the guillotine or Midas in golden starvation - then we might be intrigued to find Steven Pinker, a linguist by training, upended by his own use of words."
The first two lines of The Church's
'Gold Afternoon Fix' register Steve Kilbey's disgust with the music industry apparatus:
"Hi to all the people that are selling me,
Here's one straight from the factory."
Dorothy Parker and a younger woman arrive at the door together. The younger woman steps aside and motions Parker to go first, saying "age before beauty." Parker steps through, replying immediately: "and pearls before swine."
... If I cared I'd look it up and not build a whole analysis on a quote I don't know. Oh well. Time's too short and I'm off to church ...
While you're there, pray for a clue.
Two world-class snarks at that most deserving of targets, Hegel:
Leo Tolstoy on Hegel's writings: "Indecipherable gibberish interspersed with platitudes."
Schopenhauer: "The reader of the future may forgive me for mentioning Hegel, a philosopher of whom he has not heard."
Here is one of my fans showing off his writing talents:
I just love the way you refer to freepers and peds and all other miscreants, while I work away at my job in the prison making license plates, waiting for release, so one day I too canhave a blog and whine away.
[...]needs to use big words for she has an iherent need to appear intellectualy superior.This stems from her being a socail outcast at all levels.I think the same holds true for you, right ?
No one really give a shit if you live or die right ?
Your kids could care less.your husband, ditto, right? He cares so much he was with a prostitute last night.
That's so witty. I just don't know what to say.
And of course there was the essential Ambrose Bierce who wrote in "The Devil's Dictionary" a century ago:
Here Lies the Republican Party
Corrupt
And Generally Speaking
Hearty.
Yes, my offering was a complete photographic negative of the truly satisfying examples of invective/snark. But clueless invective can be satisfying in its own way.
"The first two lines of The Church's
'Gold Afternoon Fix' register Steve Kilbey's disgust with the music industry apparatus:"
That's not even the best invective on that album. Go back and listen to "you're still beautiful." That song drips genuine venom.
Now I'm reminded of a Frank Zappa quote: "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture."
Oh, come on CG, can't you lighten up a little and enjoy yourself? Or did the liberals steal your sense of whimsy too? Those bastards!
I don't think it's any coincidence that every time I swear to myself I'm going to quit reading blogs, I slowly get pulled back in by TBogg, alicublog, The Poorman, and Wolcott.
I would pay good money, and bad, for audio of HST reading his Nixon piece in that unmistakeable voice of his. I don't know if any exists, though.
Johnson, Parker, Samuel Butler... the English put-down is more sustained, the American is the true parent of most one-liner-driven TV comedy these days.
Daddy you bastard, more bitterness please!
Magazine:
You were hell
and everything else was just a mess
I found I'd stepped into the deepest unhappiness
we get back
I bleed into you
thank God that I don't love you
all of that's behind me now
still seems to be above you
I don't know
I don't know whether I ever knew you
but I know you
I know you never knew me
I don't know
I don't know whether I ever knew you
but I know you
I know you never knew me
Do you want to!
Hope doesn't serve me now
I don't move fast at all these days
you think you've understood
you're ignorant that way
I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry
I'm sorry I can't be cancelled out like this
we had to kill too much
before we could even kiss
"Goldstein remains worthless on every level."
Testify!
Arriving late, I see that Ubu and Spartakus beat me to Slonimsky's Lexicon of Musical Invective, but here's the all-time greatest rejoinder to a critic, from Max Reger to Rudolph Louis: I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. I have your review before me. In a moment it will be behind me.
One that didn't make it into Slonimsky's book, an appraisal of Debussy by Alberto Savinio: What a music of tiny corpses! What a music of bloated little drowned bodies floating on a putrid sea!
The bit about Wagner's music being better than it sounds, incidentally, is from Bill Nye, not Mark Twain.
I always liked Labour Chancellor Denis Healey's famous description of being attacked by his Tory shadow Geoffrey Howe as "like being savaged by a dead sheep".
I also like British political commentator Simon Hoggart:
"Peter Mandelson is the only man I know who can skulk in broad daylight."
"Reagan is the only man to take the presidency as a part-time job, a means of filling up the otherwise empty hours."
"Seeing John Major govern the country is like watching Edward Scissorhands try to make balloon animals."
"I'm often amazed at the way politicians who spend hours poring over opinion poll results in a desperate attempt to discover what the public thinks are certain they know precisely what God's views are on everything."
But one of the best literary insults ever has to be Byron's against Castlereagh:
Epitaph for Lord Castlereagh
Posterity will ne'er survey
A nobler grave than this:
Here lie the bones of Castlereagh:
Stop, traveller, and piss.
Heh, and indeed.
It's probably in Rigg's collection, but I like Shaw's review of a production of the Three Musketeers (wherein the actor playing Aramis gave a particularly bad performance): "Porthos, Athos, and Bathos"
"BET Television: the only cable station that, if he were alive, would make Malcom X a card-carrying Klansman."
Re. the denunciation of Beethoven's 9th symphony (BTW - "contemporary" includes "written 41 years after the death of the subject of the review"? WTF?): What point does it have that needs to be addressed? The reviewer did not like it, and, to be charitable, there's no arguing about taste. But he wasn't particularly pithy or witty (less quotable than e.g. the anonymous member of the audience at the premiere of one of Beethoven's concerts who loudly offered a paltry sum for the orchestra to stop playing). It really is a tired exercise in the good old tradition of "that's not music, that's just noise", very much reminiscent of the kind of put-downs that then were written about Wagner and would later be written and said about Mahler, Schönberg, Hindemith, jazz, rock 'n' roll, r&b, rap and what have you. What it got me thinking was: "If this guy is typical of the British musical establishment, no wonder that the British Isles were so insignificant in 19th-century music."
As some of the examples mentioned here illustrate, there are some inherent dangers in hurling about invective. For one thing, they often tell you more about the invector than the invectee. E.g. the quotes of Schopenhauer about Hegel and of Churchill about Attlee at least to my mind are more symptomatic of their need to soothe their bruised egos at the success of a rival (Attlee defeated Churchill in the 1945 general election, Hegel was and still is considered a more important philosopher than Schopenhauer) than they are funny or do their subject justice. Indeed, the humor in Schopenhauer's quote is more of the unintentional variety, rather like the sour congratulatory letter Arnolt Bronnen (a now largely forgotten novelist) sent to Thomas Mann when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature: "Do not underestimate the importance of this award. After the Nobel Prize was announced, many people asked me: 'Who is this Thomas Mann?'"
Michael Dirda, book critic of the Washington Post:
"It's a commonplace to sorrow for the dead trees, but with Sidney Sheldon's latest book, I regretted the ink and the glue, too."
Bernard Shaw was great with invective too, especially in his music criticism.
But really, it's nothing new. I recently read a fine book called "Abandoned to Lust: Sexual Slander and Ancient Christianity" by Jennifer Wright Knust. It's a discussion of ancient Roman invective. Back in those days, if you disagreed with a political opponent, no one expected you to explain what was wrong with his views. All you had to do was allow that he liked to perform cunnilingus on his mother in her brothel while being sodomized by a hugely hung African slave. The early Christians appropriated this style of debate, which was actually recommended in handbooks of rhetoric. So our conservatives, and our liberals for that matter, are just following in a hallowed Classical tradition.
Okay, I tried, I can't get through 74 frickin' comments, though. Sorry.
I have no doubt somewhere in there several different people mentioned Sam Clemens, Oscar Wilde, and Winston Churchill. Still, to my mind, invective was at its highest point while in their tender care. "You, madam, are ugly. Tomorrow, I will be sober." Hee. "Fleas can be taught to do nearly anything a Congressman can." And, "If this is how her Majesty treats her prisoners, she shouldn't be allowed to have any." The last two seem to be at least somewhat topical; but great invective is timeless, anyway.
Descriptive rather than invective, this sentence of Roy's is nevertheless striking for its elegant prosody and concrete imagism:
"The final decompounded words are sharp flamenco steps that tamp the dirt on the grave of the unfortunate subject."
Bravo!
Somewhat off-topic, but my favorite line in all of written English, from Ring Lardner:
Shut up, he explained.
Matt Taibbi's "Rolling Stone" farewell to Tom DeLay is sadly, not online; it is a delight.
In the latest New Republic, Thomas Frank has a delicious description of Joe Lieberman leaving a lobbyist fundraiser:
"Furtively scurrying away, as if stalked by some future Republican version of himself."
"Furtively scurrying." Now's that's a pleasing, evocative phrase. Listen to the way the vowel sounds and r's echo off of each other.
We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world--a nation of bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully.
We are not just whores for power and oil, but killer whores with hate and fear in our hearts. We are human scum, and that is how history will judge us...no redeeming social value. Just whores. Get out of our way, or we'll kill you.
Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads? Who among us can be happy and proud of having this innocent blood on our hands?
Who are these swine?
These flag-sucking half-wits who get fleeced and fooled by stupid rich kids like George Bush?
They are the same ones who wanted to have Muhammad Ali locked up for refusing to kill gooks. They speak for all that is cruel and stupid and vicious in the American character.
They are the racists and hate mongers among us--they are the Ku Klux Klan.
I piss down the throats of these Nazis. And I am too old to worry about whether they like it or not.
Fuck them.
-Hunter S. Thompson
Casey Stengel, the original "Ol' Perfesser", certainly knew his way around the snarky comment. My favorite is this, spoken to a reporter as they observed some young Mets working out in spring training:
"Now you take that kid Kranepool, he's 18 and in ten years, he could be an All-Star. Of course, that kid Goosen, he's 20, and in ten years, he's got a good chance to be 30."
My favorite Churchill:
He has all of the virtues I despise and none of the vices I admire.
Hegel was and still is considered a more important philosopher than Schopenhauer.
Well, maybe Schopenhauer was the sort of person who was content to just be a better philosopher than Hegel.
Harry Truman about Richard Nixon:
He's a man who talks out of both sides of his mouth and lies out of both sides.
Another music quote, supposedly true: an earnest young composer approached a famous conductor (von Bulow, in one version) and asked him to look at one of his compositions. The conductor reluctantly agreed. Later, when the young man asked what he thought the conductor replied: "Well, there is much here that is original and good. Unfortunately, what is good is not original and what is original is not good."
Fans of the collections of invective already referred to might enjoy the stupidly titled The Frank Muir Book which is a wide-ranging collection of quotes from the history of culture and society by those who disapproved.
Wire:
You're a waste of space
No natural grace
You're so bloody thin
You don't even begin
To interest me, not even curiosity
It's not animosity, it's just you don't interest me
You're an energy void
A black hole to avoid
No style no heart
You don't even start
To interest me, not even curiosity
- Kia -
Schopenhauer's own words demonstrate that he wasn't too content. Also the quote is another illustration of the "Words are hostages to fortune" adage, just like "Guitar bands are on their way out. Who was it who was involved in this celebrated exchange?
"His writings will be celebrated when Shakespeare is forgotten!"
"And not before."
It is easy to over-estimate the ready wit of some of the people mentioned here. Bismarck, who also had a reputation of a talent for repartee, once mentioned that he actually relied on his good memory: After conversations he would come up devastating responses too late to use them then (the old esprit d'escalier) but he then consigned them to his memory and had them ready (years later, if need be) when an occasion to use them arose. One also can recall the expression "carefully-prepared ad-libs" used with reference to Oscar Wilde, IIRC, and of course Wilde's famous exchange with Whistler (later elaborated on in a Monty Python sketch):
"I wish I'd said that."
"You will, Oscar, you will."
The problem with quite a few of the things quoted here is that they do not score precise hits on a target, but that they are verbal scatter-guns that pretty much hit anything within a 180-degree radius of the speaker. Isn't it funny how Dorothy Parker is mostly remembered for her put-downs of people whose names in the most cases are not even recorded? One could say that this is the well-formulated invective raised to an art-form where it doesn't matter whether or not it is aimed at someone in particular and which can be used again and again. (The quote about Katherine Hepburn I've also seen as just about "an actress" and it is an infinitely reusable and reused quip). In some cases, they also appear to be rude just for the sake of being rude, lacking sufficient provocation, e.g. Margot Asquith meeting Jean Harlow:
"Are you Margott Asquith?"
"No dear, the T is silent, as in 'Harlow'".
Which caused this fantasy in myself:
"Age before beauty."
"Pearls before swiIIIOOWWWW YOU TRIPPED ME, BITCH!!!"
(Not really more nasty than Mark Twain's fantasy of desecrating Jane Austen's dead body).
But the quote that really annoyed me the most was Lord Byron's epitaph to Lord Castlereagh. It is kicking a man when he's down (in his mental instability, Castlereagh had been so upset by attacks on himself and his policies that he was driven to cutting his own throat). It is anything but the expression of a contradictory point of view (news of Castlereagh's death was met with public celebrations all over Britain), so it is more as if Lord B. had come up with another way of saying something nasty about the French in the USA in 2002/03). And even if you violently reject Castlereagh's conservative policies, were they really as bad as the tyrannical rule of Napoleon whom Byron idolized (you know, wars that caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, the curtailment of liberties won under the French Revolution (Napoleon re-introduced slavery and the slave-trade and exerted a more stringent censorship than had existed under the ancien régime), that sort of thing).
You know, the nice thing about having a dog is it gets you out of the house. Especially now in the fall when the weather is so lovely, don't you think? I recommend a dog.
I'll second Twain's evisceration of Fenimore Cooper. Unlike the epigrammatic stuff Roy quotes in the main piece, Twain takes his time, making sure to get to every last corner of Cooper's awfulness.
From the great Lester Bangs, a review of Jethro Tull's Songs From The Wood that appeared in Stereo Review, August 1977.
"Performance: Hollow
"Recording: Slightly hollow
"One nice trend I’ve noticed among the poseurs who sometimes dominate contemporary music: sooner or later, they always tip their hand, and you find that you no longer have to spend quite so much time explaining to earnest acquaintances exactly why you know in your gut that groups like Jethro Tull are shams. (Or else you find after a while that you just don’t care, since you know that anybody with any sensitivity will eventually make the same discovery.) These guys tip their hand, in their over-zealous efforts to keep the old Man-for-All-Musical-Seasons puff inflated, by opening their mouths to pontificate about music and inadvertently revealing that they don’t know a damn thing about it.
"(Once, I interviewed Jethro Tull’s leader, Ian Anderson. Asked what he thought of jazz, he replied that he didn’t understand it but suspected it was all a fake, some kind of hoax perpetrated on the public. “What about Roland Kirk?” I asked. “Oh yes, I did hear one song by him once--‘Serenade To A Cuckoo.’ Quite liked it.” That was nice of Anderson, considering that anybody familiar with both performers could tell that he stole his entire flute style from Kirk--from just one song, according to his own admission.)
"On the surface, this new Jethro Tull LP is a sylvan romp, more genial and less curmudgeonly than its predecessors. But you don’t have to listen to it very long to pick up on the underlying attitude, which is as uptight, pretentious, and haughty as ever. This music and its creator’s pose have never been anything but ugly and trite."
I saw Jethro Tull in concert once -- I liked how they didn't keep playing their old stuff, but kept new stuff coming. And they encored with "What A Wonderful World," delivered absolutely straight. I'm on their side.
Okay, a musical review that's not from the Lexicon -- speaking of an amateur performance: "It is unfortunate that the author did not specify exactly how flat it was to be sung."
And my favorite Zappa quote, delivered not just against a person, but against a whole industry and most of its listeners: "[S]cience has just proven that Americans (who can barely get their shit together on the assembly line) find it absolutely UNPOSSIBLE during their precious off-duty hours to dance to any song unless it's in 4/4 at 120 beats per minute -- no fuckin' around now -- no 119 -- no 121 -- gimme the ol' 120 'n turn up the goddam handclaps! Ow! Ow! Ow! I'm dancin'! I'm dancin'!
(Don't hold back, Frank!)
I nominate Wolfgang Pauli
"It is not even wrong."
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~wo...ordpress/?
p=271
In danger of being termed a "scroll troll", I found the following invective:
A fat little flabby person, with the face of a baker, the clothes of a cobbler, the size of a barrel maker, the manners of a stocking salesman, and the dress of an innkeeper.
- - - Victor de Balabin (about Honoré de Balzac)
An enchanting toad of a man.
- - - Helen Hayes (about Robert Benchley)
When he has a party, you not only bring your own scotch, you bring your own rocks.
- - - George Burns (about Jack Benny)
He's done everybody's act. He's a parrot with skin on.
- - - Fred Allen (about Milton Berle)
His mind was like a soup dish, wide and shallow; it could hold a small amount of nearly anything, but the slightest jarring spilled the soup into somebody's lap.
- - - Irving Stone (about William Jennings Bryan)
He's an anesthetist - Prince Valium.
- - - Mort Sahl (about Johnny Carson)
He is, like almost all the eminent men of this country, only half educated. His morals, public and private, are loose.
- - - John Quincy Adams (about Henry Clay)
The biggest bug in the manure pile.
- - - Elia Kazan (about Harry Cohn)
The only time he opens his mouth is to change feet.
- - - David Feherty (about Nick Faldo)
He has all the characteristics of a dog except loyalty.
- - - Sam Houston (about Thomas Jefferson Green)
. . . a pig, an ass, a dunghill, the spawn of an adder, a basilisk, a lying buffoon, a mad fool with a frothy mouth.
- - - Martin Luther (about Henry VIII)
The plain truth is, that he was a most intolerable ruffian, a disgrace to human nature, and a blot of blood and grease upon the history of England.
- - - Charles Dickens (about Henry VIII)
A cherub's face, a reptile all the rest.
- - - Alexander Pope (about Lord Hervey)
Here's some more:
**********************
His pictures seem to resemble not pictures but a sample book of patterns of linoleum.
- - - Cyril Asquith (about Paul Klee)
He is suffering from halitosis of the intellect. That's presuming he has intellect.
- - - Harold Ickes (about Huey Long)
I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. I have your review before me. In a moment it shall be behind me.
- - - Max Reger (letter to critic Rudolph Louis, 1906)
Never trust a man who combs his hair straight from his left armpit.
- - - Alice Roosevelt Longworth (about Douglas MacArthur)
He has a face like a warthog that has been stung by a wasp.
- - - David Feherty (about Colin Montgomerie)
An agile but unintelligent and abnormal German, possessed of the mania of grandeur.
- - - Leo Tolstoy (about Friedrich Nietzsche)
If he were any dumber, he'd be a tree.
- - - Barry Goldwater (about William Scott)
A man who so much resembled a Baked Alaska - sweet, warm and gungy on the outside, hard and cold within.
- - - Joseph O'Connor (about C. P. Snow)
His style has the desperate jauntiness of an orchestra fiddling away for dear life on a sinking ship.
- - - Edmund Wilson (about Evelyn Waugh)
The only genius with an IQ of 60.
- - - Gore Vidal (about Andy Warhol)
Every drop of blood in that man's veins has eyes that look downward.
- - - Ralph Waldo Emerson (about Daniel Webster)
He looked like something that had gotten loose from Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.
- - - Harpo Marx (about Alexander Woollcott)
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