Social death

You know, the interesting thing about this story in the WSJ about prospective college students being hoisted on their own social networking petards is the juxtaposition of the Millennials’ technological sophistication and personal naiveté.

They post all kinds of stuff on their Facebook, Google+, Tumblr and other sites (and allow their friends to post all kinds of more stuff on ditto), and are then surprised that someone—a potential employer, or college admissions officer, or Granny—views it and draws some conclusions about how they spend their time.

Really, it’s kind of cute: “I’ve got this Cloak of Invisibility thing going, so I can be totally outrageous with my peeps, but there won’t be any unintended consequences. That Weiner guy? Total loser. That’ll never happen to me.”

Yeah, right.

Gulyás d'amour

You know, I’ll read pretty much anything that has Paris in the title, because I’m just flat out a sucker for the place, and I feel an affinity for people who succumb to the charm. Especially if they do so in the face of the city’s overt and covert mechanisms for sorting out the sheep from the goats.

But I have to say that Kati Marton’s Paris, A Love Story is…well, it’s just self-serving, shallow, name-dropping drivel.

Plus—it’s not really about Paris. It’s all Kati, all the time, come day, go day, decade after decade. Well, except for the parts she must find uncomfortable, where not even she can paint herself in a golden light. There are great big gaping holes in this memoir glossing over years of inconvenient stuff, which I’m going to take as a positive, because it means that the finished edition is only 199 pages.

I’m guessing she meant it to be a memoir using Paris as an anchor, as the place she returns whenever she needs to recharge her batteries. Instead, Paris is apparently the place she likes to go on the arm of famous, influential and important men who book into in boutique hotels, buy her clothes and eat in trendy restaurants. This woman drops names not as the gentle rain, but from a firehose.

Really—that whole label-junkie thing made this like a Jackie Collins novel without all the cosmetic surgery. (I’m guessing about the surgery, though. That may be one of the inconvenient things Marton’s glossed over.)

Marton is the daughter of Hungarian intellectuals, who were targets of the Nazis and then the Communists. They fled to the West in the 1950s, ending up in the US. Marton became a TV journalist, and married Peter Jennings. That marriage was doomed, apparently, and later she married US diplomat Richard Holbrooke, who gave her yet another stage for her Hungarian beauty and her Hungarian intellect and her Hungarian charm.

(It is Holbrooke’s sudden death in 2010 that propels Marton into the current “look at me, at my Hungarian tragedy” excess.)

At some point, she decided she’d become a writer and everything seems to circle back to the Hungarians sooner or later. Her first foray, an account of Raoul Wallenberg’s efforts to save Hungarian Jews from extermination, was (by her account) acclaimed by, well, everyone who matters, as being the quintessential biography of Wallenberg and blah, blah, blah.

During her research for that book, Marton discovered that she has Jewish ancestry, which gave her another hook to hang her personal Hungarian specialness on. She wrote The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World. They were Hungarian Jews, of course. I read it a few years ago; here’s the comment in my reading log: “She needs an editor; and apparently without Hungarians we’d all be speaking German…”

In the current oeuvre, Marton sets up her research for Great Escape as a pretext to tell us that Robert Capa’s old Magnum partner Henri Cartier-Bresson couldn’t resist her Hungarian beauty and her Hungarian intellect and her Hungarian charm and her fiery Hungarian sexuality; “the ninety-four-year-old legend suddenly pushed aside his walker and literally jumped me.”

If he’d been a 64-year-old dry cleaner from Newark, this wouldn’t have made the cut.

Marton is very big on slagging off other women—Jennings’s mother is cold and dismissive; Pam Harriman a manipulative bitch. No woman, apparently, can bear to compete with Marton’s Hungarian beauty, Hungarian intellect and Hungarian style. Interestingly, Hillary Rodham Clinton comes off well; primarily because she takes a completely supportive role when Marton is in that particular limbo in the time between Holbrooke’s heart attack and his death.

I also find it interesting that of the 35 photos in the book, Marton is the focal point of every one of them except for two. This woman has some serious issues.

As for Paris—well, eventually Marton gets round to it. After floundering a bit here and there following Holbrooke’s death, she sets up digs in a fashionable area (bien sûr) on rue des Ecoles. She goes to a Turkish bath. “The Algerian masseuse emits a ‘Mon Dieu!’ at the tightness of my shoulders. ‘My husband died,’ I explain. Over the deep chasm of culture, history, language, age and circumstance, we connect briefly, as two women.”

We are meant to understand that Marton is on the path to healing when she marches into a shop on the rue du Cherche-Midi and buys “a pair of dangerously high-heeled suede pumps”, framboise-colored dangerously high-heeled pumps. Non-Hungarian famboise-colored dangerously high-heeled pumps.

The only love affair Marton really describes throughout this vanity piece is with herself.

Just say any crazy thing you like

In case you’re unaware, we are in the midst of Banned Books Week. Sponsored by the American Library Association, this really celebrates the principles of the First Amendment: the right to free expression.

If you can pick up a copy of Tom Sawyer, The Great Gatsby, The Naked & the Dead, Animal Farm, The Satanic Verses, Slaughterhouse-Five or In Cold Blood—thank a librarian, because they’ve been on the front lines of the war against book killers pretty much as long as there have been libraries.

It’s astonishing the reasons the thought police come up with to forbid you and me from reading something.

Two California school districts banned an edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales’ “Little Red Riding Hood.” Communist, you ask? No—there was a picture of Red carrying food and wine to Granny and the nannies were worried about promoting alcohol use.

(Look, I can understand having problems with the brothers Grimm. Those stories are full of all the viciousness, vindictiveness and venom that humans are capable of. Plus—as I recall, there was a whole lot of the other side of life, too. Just off the top of my head I recall Rapunzel, whose prince had his eyes poked out and went wandering in the forest until she showed up some time later...with her twins. As a child I never blinked at this. Now, I do kinda wonder.)

Huckleberry Finn has been under attack by the politically correct because it uses “nigger” and “injun”; the bowdlerizers are out with their hedge clippers, ready to clean everything up. To their standards, of course.

Lest you think that this sort of thing is history, think again. In 1999 a Georgia school board required student get written parental position to read Hamlet, Macbeth or King Lear. “Adult language,” sex and violence were the rationale. And Texas continues to ban all kinds of things, just because it's Texas.

Here’s a list of the most-challenged books between 2000 and 2009. Harry Potter is at the top of the list.

Of course forbidding books is completely anathema to the operation of democracy, which depends on the free exchange of ideas to even get off the ground. (This partially explains the difficulties nations trying to transition from dictatorships big on censorship to democracies. No one knows how to share and evaluate new and different ideas.) Understanding this, our Founding Fathers made it the very first Amendment clarifying the basis of what the new nation was going to be about.

And, in the end, the whole concept of book banning—whether it’s the Roman Catholic Church’s Index, an Islamic fatwa against writers/cartoonists/film makers or Nazis burning entire libraries in the Berlin night—is rather counterproductive. You tell a kid not to put beans in his nose, sure as sunrise, he’s going to start stuffing haricots verts up his nostrils. You ban a book or put a contract out on its author, the world and his wife are going to rush out to score a bootlegged copy and find out what all the fuss was about.

Not that there isn't plenty of offensive, badly written crap out there; ratcheted up exponentially by the platform the Internet has given to any bozo who wants to blog. (Oh, wait...) But what I say is, if you don't like it, leave it on the shelf.

In the meantime: God bless librarians. And you—I’m looking at you, now—go read a book! 

Signs of the times 5

The South Bay area has a considerable number of Asian residents. Sunnyvale must be full of South Asians, because you can’t walk six yards without running into an Indian restaurant, sari shop or snack joint.

If you go by the numbers of Chinese markets, restaurants and acupuncturists, Cupertino would seem to be an outpost of Fujian province.

And driving down El Camino Real through Santa Clara is like being in Seoul. For example:

I blame the Cooke

I was prepared to enjoy Alistair Cooke’s The American Home Front, 1941-1942, based on watching him for years as the host of PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre. He struck me then as amiable and educated, so I figured this would be a perceptive and eminently readable exploration of Americans transitioning from isolationism to full-fledged commitment to global war.

Instead I found tortuous sentence construction and paragraphs that form impenetrable walls across upwards of a page and a half. Yes—a single unbroken graf covering 60 lines of type. Many of them, as a matter of fact. Way, way too many.

Want an example?

“Like most Southern cities, Atlanta has better than its share of determined liberals, in a region where being a liberal is as hard on individual endurance as being a conscientious objector in a city at war. The ambition of these people in Georgia had been to have the state Constitution revised, no revolutionary itch in this, a revision every ten years is promised in the Constitution itself, but as the years go by it gets harder and harder to loosen a vested interest way from its foundations, if only to give it more breathing space elsewhere. In Atlanta, the cry is for ‘redistricting’ and sweet release from the county unit system, whereby the electoral system is figured on antique population figures, which consequently allow two representatives in the state legislature to the smallest county—with a population of a few hundred—and only six representatives to Atlanta, which has a population of nearly half a million.”

That quote is in one of the medium-sized grafs, which is to say: it only goes on for about 80% of the page. But I was pretty well hors de combat before I got to the third sentence.

Moreover, it’s shallow; Cooke isn’t giving us a big scoop so much as a fast skim. As he crosses the country he never stays more than one night in a place. He talks with a few people he finds on the streets or at a diner counter and then heads out of town.

(Well, might have stayed longer in the second half of the book; but I quit reading after he left California and he still had the northern journey back to the east coast to go.)

It’s not often that I don’t finish reading a book; but I decided that my life isn’t going to last long enough to plough through those paragraphs. Sometimes a girl’s just gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.