Garrison Keillor, Vulgarian. In defense of Bernard-Henri Lévy. By Christopher Hitchens. posted Monday, Feb. 13, 2006--SLATE.
Christopher Hitchens takes Garrison Keillor to task (SLATE) for slamming (NYT) Bernard-Henri Levy's take on the US, American Vertigo. I'm patiently waiting for someone to take on Hitchens on Keillor on Levy on America. #
I dunno.~not really an unusual extent of (meta)commentary~ but ok the Slate headline does maybe produce confusion about who on who on who: Hitchens vs (Keillor vs Levy).
---------------------------now content:
Kiellor: You meet Sharon Stone and John Kerry and a woman who once weighed 488 pounds and an obese couple carrying rifles, but there's nobody here whom you recognize. In more than 300 pages, nobody tells a joke. Nobody does much work. Nobody sits and eats and enjoys their food. You've lived all your life in America, never attended a megachurch or a brothel, don't own guns, are non-Amish, and it dawns on you that this is a book about the French. There's no reason for it to exist in English, except as evidence that travel need not be broadening and one should be wary of books with Tocqueville in the title. well! I enjoyed that, Kiellor. surprised. nicely biting.
...America is changing, he concludes, but America will endure. "I still don't think there's reason to despair of this country. No matter how many derangements, dysfunctions, driftings there may be . . . no matter how fragmented the political and social space may be; despite this nihilist hypertrophy of petty antiquarian memory yikes I think I'm with you on this Kiellor yikes ; despite this hyperobesity - increasingly less metaphorical - of the great social bodies that form the invisible edifice of the country; despite the utter misery of the ghettos . . . I can't manage to convince myself of the collapse, heralded in Europe, of the American model."
Thanks, pal. I don't imagine France collapsing anytime soon either. Thanks for coming. Don't let the door hit you on the way out. For your next book, tell us about those riots in France, the cars burning in the suburbs of Paris. What was that all about? Were fat people involved?
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other bits, still Keillor re Levy (the hits just keep on coming! garrison, I did not know you-):
wow syntax: He blows a radiator hee writing about baseball - "this sport that contributes to establishing people's identities and that has truly become part of their civic and patriotic religion, which is baseball" -this syntax, this syntax that says things, which is syntax. whoa.
...Uh, actually not. Negatory on "pope" and "national" and "entire" and "most" and "embodies" and "Doubleday."
Lévy is quite comfortable with phrases like "as always in America."
And good Lord, the childlike love of paradox. And so the reader is fascinated and exhausted hee- by Lévy's tedious and original-hee thinking: "A strong bond holds America together, but a minimal one. An attachment of great force, but not fiercely resolute. A place of high - extremely high - symbolic tension, but a neutral one, a nearly empty one." And what's with the flurries of rhetorical questions? Is this how the French talk or is it something they save for books about America? "What does this experience tell us?" he writes about the Mall of America. "What do we learn about American civilization from this mausoleum of merchandise, this funeral accumulation of false goods and nondesires in this end-of-the-world setting? What is the effect on the Americans of today of this confined space, this aquarium, where only a semblance of life seems to subsist?" And what is one to make hee (oh,mc, what would it mean? et up all yr french foucault dija?) of the series of questions - 20 in a row! - about Hillary Clinton, in which Lévy implies she is seeking the White House to erase the shame of the Lewinsky affair? Was Lévy aware of the game 20 Questions, commonly played on long car trips in America? Are we to read this passage as a metaphor of American restlessness? Does he understand how irritating this is? Does he? Do you? May I stop now?
well Hitchens, I'm sold. what are you going to say to this? now, you did write that pretty funny 'college essay" (in Nyr oh no you didn't that was Christopher Buckley! The New Yorker 11/28 issue: Shouts and Murmurs - College Essay) and I wld have tht you'd have the advantage with me over Keillor, but wow I don't think I will think that in the future. ok, gimme what you got.
huh. nothing really. calls Keillor a humorless philistine (but I found his article -unexecpectedly- Totally Funny. and sharp) and suggests GK probably doesn't specify other French writers because he hasn't read Foucault or Hollebecq. and you CH are calling him a jerk? not.howitfeels.to me. full-blown, corn-fed, white-bread American nativist bloviation. sheesh man. and CH talks about "an arsenal of Francophobic clichés" in his introductory paragraph but did GK use any? CH unsarcastically calls Levy's praise of Seattle "this minor paean" and seems to consider it cutting to point to the contrastingly simple statement by Keillor: The response consists of nine words and two letters. "OK, fine. The Eiffel Tower is quite the deal, too." oooh, ok is not a word to an intellectual? holymoly. the thing is I find Keillor here funny and smart exactly in contrast to how bombastic (Keillor's word) BHL's quoted prose is; and CH only reinforces this, I'm surprise he doesn't say anything I like!
and in conclusion, an agreeable voice from Salon's frey: HansEisenbeis defending keillor (1) Feb 17 11:07AM: I was not much surprised to read Chris Hitchens defending his friend Bernard Henri Levy. ...In the realm of dueling reviews, I have to say that Keillor provides a lot more evidence for his more tenable argument that Levy basically doesn't have a clue ye-ah, and it's emphatically yes not because he somehow overlooked Lake Woebegon in his travels, as Hitch seems to imply. It is merely tit-for-tat-for-tit. The Frenchman reduces his America to a saccharine shot of lukewarm cliches, the American takes a sip and spits it out nice, and the boozy Brit drops his coat on the floor and starts in on the "vulgar, nativist American" nonsense. Vulgar, of course, means common--and Keillor's populist shtick (Hitch apparently got his dander up too early in the review to recognize that it was, in fact, shtick playing off of Levy's stereotypes) is precisely the antidote to Anglo-Franco-American miscommunication that is needed, but it is a shtick that almost always is too subtle for British ears huh. ... I'm loathe to review a review of a review, but what the hey. I fear Keillor has, in recent years, lost energy for the public parley, the way he used to do. Still, it would be fun to read him responding to Hitch, since Keillor is more than the expat's equal, and has the advantage of a native's sober understanding of the quick jab and the non-nonsense uppercut, so easy to land when a man like Hitch is running around the ring loudly protesting what he in the first place misread.
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