Maybe the best thing you will read all year — except “quiver with rage” is what I will continue to do:
The allegedly learned and refined weren’t really that refined or learned; it’s that they weren’t really intellectually, emotionally, or morally present at all. (…)
If you want to know what I mean, just read a few of the select explanations provided this week by the writers who chose to sit out the PEN dinner…
Can you imagine Balzac arguing that a novelist mustn’t scrutinize the poor and the rich alike, as the poor—poor souls—are too underprivileged to pass through literature’s relentless magnifying glass? (…)
Why, then, be angry? Why quiver with rage, say, when reading that Keith Gessen, still another of the letter’s signatories, admitted on Twitter that he had never even read an issue of Charlie Hebdo, a statement this emperor of eloquence saw fit to adorn with an emoticon of a smiley face?
.@keithgessen admits to never having read Charlie Hebdo, yet has signed letter protesting award. Loathsome. https://t.co/ejWWA1ro5l
— Jamie Kirchick (@jkirchick) April 29, 2015
