The following is a cartoon I sketched regarding the intellectually ridiculous icon worshipping of James McBride. After the cartoon appears the counter critique I wrote regarding McBride's hagiographical essay, which I sent to “distinguished writer in residence" James McBride, Institute Director Prof. Ted Conover, Associate Director Meredith Broussard, Assistant to the Director Prof. Andrea Rosenberg, Cultural Reporting and Criticism Prof. Katie Roiphe, and Literary Reportage Prof. Robert Boynton, Carter Journalism Institute, NYU. Surprise! Not one of them deigned to respond. And to think the CJI actually has a "First Amendment Watch"! Doesn't that imply a certain openness to criticism? Or does it really only imply a certain predilection for virtue signaling? It is astonishing to me, even despite my long experience, that likely not one literary magazine in America (besides The American Dissident) would publish the following criticism. Freedom in America really has been replaced by in-lockstep PC and consequent widespread cowardice and unwillingness to go against that grain. How sad, truly sad, that the Sixties brought that about! For the two cartoons I drew on Toni Morrison, as well as a dialogue de sourds, see https://wwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com/2016/11/toni-morrison_23.html and https://wwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com/2016/11/toni-morrison.html.
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Praise Is the New Criticism—A Review of a Review
Well, I hesitated with “Toni Morrison: First Lady of Letters.” After all, I only had three more free New York Times articles. But the lead hooked me: “The Source of Self-Regard, a new collection of essays spanning four decades of the author’s career, cements her status as an unparalleled literary innovator.” Clearly, for anyone who questioned and challenged establishment utterances, it raised a serious question: Will the iconographer/hagiographer aka literary critic James McBride, “distinguished writer in residence” at the N.Y.U Carter Journalism Institute, define and otherwise prove “unparalleled literary innovator”? Was Toni Morrison really somehow better than Orwell, Celine, Solzhenitsyn, Ibsen, and so many other writers? Illustrating the review, the black and white photo of Morrison looking upwards in a daze of self-composure encompassed in a band of white light presented her as an icon.
Above the reviewer’s name appears an odd statement: “When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.” But how to prove the alleged independence of the reviewer? In essence, how can a university “distinguished writer in residence” possibly be independent from the academic/literary establishment paying him so nicely?
McBride begins his praise with a lengthy, seemingly irrelevant account of “when I was a 24-year-old reporter at The Boston Globe, I was sent to cover Harvard University’s Hasty Pudding Woman of the Year ceremony.” Who was celebrated there? Well, not Morrison, but Ella Fitzgerald. McBride then praises the latter: “She endured more pain and suffering than I knew or would ever know. Her pain and joys were hers to guard, to share, to translate into her art as she saw fit. She had the benefit of wisdom, which I, a young hothead, did not.”
McBride finally gets into the subject of his essay after his long Fitzgerald eulogy: eulogizing Morrison! “Like Fitzgerald, she rose from humble beginnings to world prominence,” he lauds. “Like Fitzgerald, she is intensely private. And like Fitzgerald, she has given every iota of her extraordinary American-born talent and intellect to the great American dream.”
All of McBride’s argument is of course subjective. In fact, when it comes to literature, anything can be argued, thanks to literature’s inherent subjectivity. The problem arises when those like McBride somehow try to present it as an objective science. “Morrison has, as they say in church, lived a life of service. Whatever awards and acclaim she has won, she has earned. She has paid in full. She owes us nothing.” Perhaps a “life of service” to the academic/literary establishment? Clearly, if she had criticized the latter, she never would have climbed its ladder to receive its prime anointment—the Nobel Prize. But just how corrupt has that Prize become nowadays? Indeed, has McBride ever even contemplated that… or like most writers simply opened wide and swallowed, never wondering who the faceless judges and what their literary biases might be?
And then, bingo!, surprise!, out of the blue, McBride pushes his Trump derangement syndrome! Now who would have thought an objective book review would include that? “The nation staggers from one crisis to the next, led by a president with all the grace of a Cyclops and a brain the size of a full-grown pea,” he argues in full irrationality. After all, a pea-brain, Republican or Democrat, cannot possibly rise to the top.
Then immediately (in the same long sentence), McBride moves from the Devil [i.e., Trump] to God [i.e., Morrison], lauding: “the mightiness, the stillness, the pure power and beauty of words delivered in thought, reason and discourse, still carry the unstoppable force of a thousand hammer blows, spreading the salve of righteousness that can heal our nation and restore the future our children deserve.” And of course McBride fails to present just one example to back his wild acclaim! Why?
“She is our greatest singer,” praises McBride. “And this book is perhaps her most important song.” Yes, I can hear the rap music now: fuckin mofucka fuckin mofucka you my fuckin nigga mofucka… Oops! Should I have written the “n-word” to satisfy establishment word controllers? But then McBride finally dissects the book in question, noting the three parts, and “It includes a gorgeous eulogy for James Baldwin,” who like me did not write the “n-word,” but instead wrote “nigger.” And of course McBride fails to evoke the Augsburg University controversy with that regard. Well, I digress but McBride’s digressions encourage me to do so!
The reviewer pushes more inflations without illustrations: “It is through jazz, actually, that one can best understand the imaginative power and technical mastery that Morrison has achieved over the course of her literary journey. No American writer I can think of, past or present, incorporates jazz into his or her writing with greater effect. Her work doesn’t bristle with jazz. It is jazz.”
And so what does that even mean? Without an example, one is left in a cloud of hyperbole. And on and on McBride jazzes: “One way to appreciate Morrison’s supreme blend of technical and literary creativity — without reading a word of her books — is to listen to the unedited version of Nina Simone’s recording of the swing-era song ‘Good Bait’, made famous by Count Basie.”
In fact, why bother even reading McBride’s review? Why not just listen to Count Basie instead? Ah, but then the reviewer exalts “Simone, a singer and musical genius, doesn’t vocalize on the recording. She plays piano. She begins with a gorgeous, improvised fugue, is joined by a bassist and a drummer and leads the trio in light supper-club swing, and intensifies into muscular Count Basie-like, big-band punches.” What happened to Morrison? How did we get on the Simone tangent? It is insane! It is laughably insane!
“She [Simone, not Morrison] then breaks loose from the trio altogether and blasts into a solo, two-part contrapuntal Bach-like invention, which develops momentarily into three parts. She blows through the fugue-like passages with such power you can almost hear the bassist and drummer getting to their feet as they rejoin. But she’s left them. She’s gone! She closes the piece with a flourishing Beethoven-like concerto ending, having traveled through three key changes and four time signature changes. That’s not jazz. That’s composition. It’s also Toni Morrison.”
Ah, finally back to Morrison! But then surprise, like Trump, the white bad/black good narrative arrives: “A few years ago she [Morrison, not Simone] recounted to an interviewer that as a young girl, she had a cleaning job in a rich white person’s home. Her employer [i.e., the white guy] yelled at her one day for being a useless cleaner.”
McBride then reverts back to himself as a wide-eyed worshipper then, surprise!, the white supremacy narrative arrives: “I used to believe that God created Toni Morrison for the voiceless among us, that He knelt down and encouraged a little black girl in Lorain, Ohio, to whisper ‘I want blue eyes’ to her friend Chloe Wofford, who, 30 years, two children, one divorce, one name change and more than four cities later, would sit down at age 39 and stick a pin in the balloon of white supremacy, and in the hissing noise that followed create ‘The Bluest Eye,’ one of the greatest sonnets in the canon of American literature. But I don’t believe that anymore.”
Finally, McBride concludes: “Toni Morrison does not belong to black America. She doesn’t belong to white America. She is not ‘one of us.’ She is all of us. She is not one nation. She is every nation.” And thus I conclude, if I may, that McBride ought to occupy a new position at NYU: hagiographer-in-residence. He could also teach a new journalism course, Crap 101.
[Full Disclosure: I have not read the Bible, nor have I read Toni Morrison, nor do I feel compelled by McBride’s eulogy to do so… and I do not listen to Ella Fitzgerald and I did not vote for Hillary. My review is a criticism of the critic, not of the critic’s icon.]
From: George Slone
Sent: Wednesday, February 27, 2019 10:28 AM
To: jamesmcbride@jamesmcbride.com
Cc: maggiesaunders820@gmail.com; katie.freeman@us.penguingroup.com
Subject: Your review et al
To James McBride, “distinguished writer in residence” at the N.Y.U Carter Journalism Institute:
I send you this review of one of your reviews in the hope it might possibly encourage you to rethink your status as well-remunerated sell-out and somehow step out of your safe-space identity politics box to embrace individuality, real “rude truth-telling” individuality. Fear not, the likelihood of my getting it published is close to nil.
Sincerely,
G. Tod Slone, PhD (Université de Nantes, FR), aka P. Maudit, Founding Editor (1998)
The American Dissident, a 501c3 Nonprofit Journal of Literature, Democracy, and Dissidence
217 Commerce Rd.
Barnstable, MA 02630
From: George Slone
Sent: Wednesday, February 27, 2019 10:35 AM
To: ted.conover@nyu.edu; merbroussard@nyu.edu; andrea.rosenberg@nyu.edu; cultural.program@nyu.edu; robert.boynton@nyu.edu
Cc: editor@nyunews.com; mgmt@nyunews.com; jamesmcbride@jamesmcbride.com
Subject: A review of a review by one of your own et al
To Institute Director Prof. Ted Conover, Associate Director Meredith Broussard, Assistant to the Director Prof. Andrea Rosenberg, Cultural Reporting and Criticism Prof. Katie Roiphe, and Literary Reportage Prof. Robert Boynton, Carter Journalism Institute, NYU:
Well, if this is journalism, then you really need to take a deep look at yourselves! Read my review of one of your “distinguished professor” reviews below. Why would professors of journalism at NYU likely NOT discuss it with their students? Why would the New York Times NEVER publish it? Why would NYU’s student newspaper, Washington Square News, likely NEVER publish it? Why is journalism rated so amazingly low today by the public… amidst journalism’s great cloud of backslapping and self-congratulating? Think! Think about your particular contribution to that low rating! Ah, the silence of the professors and business-as-usual in their ivory tower…
Sincerely,
G. Tod Slone, PhD (Université de Nantes, FR), aka P. Maudit, Founding Editor (1998)
The American Dissident, a 501c3 Nonprofit Journal of Literature, Democracy, and Dissidence
217 Commerce Rd.
Barnstable, MA 02630
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