or Powell's or me• • •
"Mike and Jon, Jon and Mike—I've known them both for years, and, clearly, one of them is very funny. As for the other: truly one of the great hangers-on of our time."—Steve Bodow, head writer, The Daily Show
•
"Who can really judge what's funny? If humor is a subjective medium, then can there be something that is really and truly hilarious? Me. This book."—Daniel Handler, author, Adverbs, and personal representative of Lemony Snicket
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"The good news: I thought Our Kampf was consistently hilarious. The bad news: I’m the guy who wrote Monkeybone."—Sam Hamm, screenwriter, Batman, Batman Returns, and Homecoming
January 23, 2008
The read on TNR is a touch harsh, but on target.
Problem is, most of us knowledgeable about the Holocaust (my parents and I just made it out of Vienna past the Anschluss) don't want to touch the TNR/Finkelstein/Dershowitz/et al kind of shouting matches with a ten-foot Torah.
Of course, "ugly Jews" exist and any novelist or screenwriter can put them into his or her work. But then one side shouts "Anti-Semitism" and the other side uses the portrayal for practicing it. A plague on both houses.
donescobar: Ain't life crazy.
Posted by: Mike Meyer at January 23, 2008 01:31 PMFor some reason, a copy of TNR showed up in my mailbox yesterday, with a label indicating that the subscription runs through the end of 2008, something like two years after I thought I'd finally killed off the gift subscription my parents have been giving me for a couple of decades. Won't it ever stop?
Posted by: darrelplant at January 23, 2008 01:35 PMI thought we'd already settled this question! Write some more about literature, IO-, um, I mean, "Jon"!
Posted by: Upside Down Flag at January 23, 2008 02:49 PMI thank myself for the link.
Posted by: IOZ at January 23, 2008 03:27 PMIf Dershowitz doesn't make all self-hating Jews out there feel bad enough, I recommend David Mamet's The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Self-Hatred, and the Jews. It was like visiting a relative you know is going to scream at you for three hours about how awful you are, but you go anyway out of some kind of protozoaic hope that this time will be different, and you can just talk about old times and football and maybe a little military history. Then BOOM!
At said visit, I referred to Israel's reputation since 1967 as "tainted."
A relative then said, "I'm uncomfortable with that word."
"Um, controversial?"
A nod, and the conversation could proceed.
He's part of that large group I call Used To Be Liberal Except About Israel, Now The Rest of Their Views Mirror Their Right-Wing Israelo-Mania. Though I guess to Mamet we're all worse than Hitler.
--SF
(in Russia my family's name was "Flamingovsky")
I believe it was Dershowitz who said that torture worked for the Nazis so we should use it too. Apparently, losing the war and totally f*cking up your country and several other countries is not a good enough reason not to imitate the Nazis.
Nice future they have planned for us and everyone else.
Posted by: Susan - NC at January 23, 2008 09:51 PMSusan-NC: And it works EVERY time. (torture-check, lose war-check, ruin country-check, ruin other countries-check, yep it works)
Posted by: Mike Meyer at January 24, 2008 12:41 AM
