Close readings: Let’s contemn Peter Hitchens

By Dan Brooks in Close Reading 2 Comments
Which is the fun brother?

Which is the fun brother?

I was looking for essays about Flashman yesterday and ran across this appreciation by Peter Hitchens, self-described Burkean conservative and brother of Christopher Hitchens. Burkean conservatism was last seen railing against the French revolution, but it’s not Hitchens’s archaic politics that irritate me. It’s his overblown prose. Here he is on the Flashman books:

I’ve re-read many of them since, but one by one, on various long journeys where I knew for certain they’d keep me from tedium as the plane ground slowly through the night.

The reader will be shocked to learn that Hitchens reads books one at a time. And what’s the perfect verb for how a plane flew? Oh yeah: ground.

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Close readings: VA congressman argues that restricting abortions creates jobs

By Dan Brooks in Close Reading 8 Comments
Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R–VA) responds to allegations that his name is made up.

Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R–VA) responds to allegations that his name is made up.

Yesterday, during committee markup of a probably-doomed abortion bill making its way through the House, Rep. Bob Goodlatte argued that restricting access to abortions creates jobs. “Having new children brought into the world is not harmful to job creation,” he said, himself employing litotes for a job it maybe didn’t need to do. It was a peculiar line of reasoning, partly for the sheer bulk of its verbiage—more on that later—and partly because of its ambitious attempt to connect an old controversy to the political byword of the day. Strap on your chunky glasses, because Rep. Goodlatte is the subject of today’s Close Reading.

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Close Readings: Jeff Gordinier is sad you’re petty, but so it goes

By Dan Brooks in Close Reading 2 Comments
Food writer Jeff Gordinier—it's not his fault; everyone looks like a douche at PoetryFoundation.

Food writer Jeff Gordinier—it’s not his fault; everyone looks like a douche on PoetryFoundation.

A couple weeks ago, my friend and editor Erika Fredrickson wrote this article for the Missoula Independent about Georgia Pellegrini’s “Girl Hunter” weekends. In addition to letting me use the word “rimjob” in music reviews, Erika is very nice, so I was disappointed to hear that New York Times food writer Jeff Gordinier tried to big-time her when he showed up to cover Girl Hunter, too. Gordinier believed he had an exclusive, and he appears to have strong-armed Pellegrini’s publicist into excluding Erika from the falconry and pheasant hunting portions of the weekend. You can read about the whole sordid affair on Jim Romenesko’s media blog, along with Gordinier’s explanation, which is the subject of today’s Close Reading.

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Close readings: With 48 hours to go, Palin spreads misinformation

By Dan Brooks in Close Reading 2 Comments
"And what about the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier? I say we dig him up, identify the dental records and give an American hero the recognition he deserves."

“And what about the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier? I say we dig him up, identify the dental records and give an American hero the recognition he deserves.”

With approximately 48 hours until we hit the federal debt ceiling and maybe cause dead financiers to rise from their graves and devour the faces of the living, the Senate is working on a deal. If you read down a few paragraphs in that article, you will find a quote that Ben al-Fowlkes described as the kind of thing you’re supposed to talk about with your caucus, not the New York Times. “Anybody who would vote for that in the House as a Republican would virtually guarantee a primary challenger,” says Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R–KS). Not a primary challenger to Tim Huelskamp! How will the Republic survive? In the contest between individual selfishness and collective responsibility that is our legislative October, selfishness is still fighting. Case in point: Sarah Palin’s screed of misinformation and contradictory indictments of the president, posted yesterday on her damn Facebook wall.

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Close Readings: Michele Bachmann declares End Times

By Dan Brooks in Close Reading 3 Comments
A rare image from Stars Without Makeup catches Michele Bachmann without her prosthetic eyes.

A rare image from Stars Without Makeup catches Michele Bachmann without her prosthetic eyes.

Our fine furloughed friend The Cure sent me a link to this radio interview Michele Bachmann did with a show called Understanding the Times, in which she declares that we are in “God’s end times.” “Maranatha come Lord Jesus,” the Minnesota congresswoman said, “His day is at hand.” You can read a distilled version of her gibbering godspeak here. “Maranatha,” by the way, is an Aramaic expression that either means “our lord has come” or the imperative “come, lord.” It is also a brand of nut butter. Close reading of Bachmann’s particular brand of nut butter after the jump.

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