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New York, 8:31 AM
Tue Nov 24
46 posts in the last 24 hours
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12/29/08
12/29/08
I don't think I've ever laughed so hard at the Holocaust since Hogan's Heroes.
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Oprah has horrible, horrible taste in books.
She's a sucker for moving, uplifting tales, weepies that always have to teach some moral lesson. This is pretty much the opposite of any first-rate work of literature or art, or in any case quite beside the point. She has no time for quality of prose, or ambiguity; the books she favors are really TV movies in another form.
She likes the "high-concept" Hollywood pitch of them, but "books" seems to add some sort of classy legitimacy for the outlandish, sentimental, and often false dreck she's peddling.
I don't think it's cynical or intentional, and I'm sure there have been exceptions. But she really needs to wake up to avoid embarrassments like these.
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It'd be great if she went with more like the 3 (wonderful) exceptions you pointed out. Shame only one of the 3 is contemporary, for the author's sake- good for Eugenides.
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Although of course those of us raised by church ladies and such don't go "Bad for the Christians!" whenever Bush, Mel Gibson, or Rod Stewart [aside: why Rod Stewart? Not sure; I just really hate him] open their hideous mouths. (Insert Lani Guineer's speil about the tyranny of the majority here.) Maybe we should start?
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Or was that a bad thing to say? Not sure.
Meanwhile, I'm half-WASP and quite enjoy people making fun of WASPs.
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Jerzy Kosinski may have misled people about his past, but The Painted Bird was published as a work of fiction.
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The idea that Kosinski's books were plagiarized or largely written by others has been discredited. As a non-native English speaker, he did hire translators to help him with his prose, especially early in his career. But the content, style and themes of all his novels are remarkably consistent, which would have been impossible if different people wrote each one.
Plus, his main characters all tend to be kind of a-holes, just as he apparently was in real life.
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I can think of a lot of people who might espouse this unfortunate logic -- but I'm stunned that in this case it's uttered by a literary agent. Don't those folks need a withering skepticism as their first line of defense against all the no-talent pretenders who approach them?
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