Tag / hack

by Edward Champion

Kate Tuttle: The Talentless Corporate Husk Who Bangs Out Hollow Platitudes About Books

Kate Tuttle has called me a “noted asshole.” That may or may not be true. But her reliance on generic corporate language for her “reviews” makes her a pathetic bore who is more than a little dead inside.

Kate Tuttle is an unremarkable corporate windup doll who writes about books much in the same way that moribund losers sign up for macramé classes to make friends: namely, deadening the room with dull and desiccated sentences, life-sucking generalizations, and all the lack of adventure that you see in some uptight and hopelessly white suburbanite who upturns her nose at any dinner entree with a touch of paprika. I’ve stayed silent about this toothless husk for many years. There was really no reason to care. Because I tend to ignore those who couldn’t write an original thought to salvage their sad and spent lives. Indeed, my only contact with this miserable batbrain over the great epoch of my Molotov-throwing existence was to ask her to pass along my thanks to her far more accomplished husband for mentioning me in his truly excellent book, Bunk. But that was only because I didn’t have the dude’s email. I don’t think that is the sign of an “asshole” — I’m sorry, “noted asshole,” to evoke Tuttle’s panache for unoriginal vitriol. Then again, the literary world is so dull and gutless, so casually resentful towards any talent who sticks out, that they feel an overwhelming and deranged need to summon me every so often — despite all the long debunked canards about me — into the role of the dependable heavy.

Well, now that Tuttle has called me a “noted asshole”– this when I tend to be kind and congenial if you meet me in the streets — I feel that I have a responsibility to live up to the ridiculous moniker by finally exposing this hideous charlatan, who is better suited to banging out press releases in between suicidal ideations. Largely because I very much subscribe to what Sean Connery once identified as “the Chicago Way” when it comes to settling scores with insignificant and unsmiling fuckwits who write with the absent gusto of someone who is permanently dead inside. If she had simply said nothing, the fireworks you are about to see would not have been written. Consider this a caveat to any other corporate media dullard who wants to start shit with me.

To get a sense for how this desperate gasbag pads out her “pieces,” one can look no further than her review of Abigail Thomas’s Still Life at Eighty:

She does worry about the state of her memory, as perhaps everyone her age does. “My memory is full of holes,” she notes, and later asks, “Does losing memories presage losing my mind?”

Yes, Tuttle really does thinks this little of her readership. Despite the cited quote already establishing that Thomas worries about her memory, Tuttle feels the need to spoon-feed this in the most insultingly condescending terms, even though anyone with a sixth grade level of education could decipher this obvious point on his own. And Tuttle is so artless a writer that the word “worry” appears seven times in an 800 word review.

Tuttle’s proclivity to repeat herself like someone suffering from palilalia is also prominently featured in this Mina Javaherbin profile:

Children’s book author Mina Javaherbin is an architect as well as a writer, and her latest book was largely inspired by the architecture of her father’s hometown, Isfahan, Iran.

Kate Tuttle is a critic who criticizes books in works of criticism! (Uses of “architect” or “architecture” appear five times here. And this senseless snippet is under 400 words.) Was there some internal memo within the Globe ordering its staffers to repeat words like this to court the departing eyeballs?

In fact, Tuttle is such a careless hack that she can’t even match proper tense in a lede: “but everywhere she turns there’s another obstacle — including some that might be deadly.” Boston Globe, this is the “editor” you’ve kept on board to run your books section? Indeed, Tuttle is such an incurious bean counter that a thoughtful dude like Alex Segura is reduced to spouting generalizations hammered in by media training: “It felt like an interesting challenge.” And in interviewing Jodi Picoult on the vital topic of book bans, Tuttle never once brokers anything other than general questions, which is a significant insult and a trivialization toward an author needlessly censored by fascist (and often sexist) zealots. In rightly commending Rebecca L. Davis’s fearless work, Tuttle describes her “well-turned and crystal clear explanations.” (Tuttle can’t seem to pick a lane when only one modifier offering the same meaning will do.)

And if you think that Kate Tuttle is a champion for women writers, consider the crass way in which she belittles Jami Attenberg for writing “a longer timespan than she’d used in previous novels.” Now I’m obviously no fan of Jami Attenberg. But I would never denigrate a writer like this. A writer who flexes her wings and attempts ambition shouldn’t be singled out like this. Would Tuttle have made the same pronouncement if Attenberg were a man? Perhaps this was an aloof attempt at gender parity. But three women who I read this passage to on the phone this afternoon (I did not tell them that a woman wrote this until after they answered) all told me that this came across as patronizing.

I may or may not be an asshole, “noted” or otherwise. But I can tell you this much. I actually write in a voice that you’ll fucking remember. Kate Tuttle will continue banging out these hopeless platitudes and lackadaisical gaffes, but she has failed to grasp that well-behaved women never make history.

by Edward Champion

Dmitry Samarov’s Hack

In which a thoughtful volume on what it is to live as a cab driver (and a human) is compared against the needless privilege promulgated by Jonathan Safran Foer.

It was recently suggested by The New York Daily News‘s Alexander Nazaryan that Jonathan Safran Foer’s purported “truth about human experience” could be instantly dismissed due to Foer not really knowing a life without bona-fide hardship. Nazaryan came to this viewpoint not necessarily because he is bitter (he claims to be, but I don’t think he is), but because he was raised in Soviet Russia.*

Fortunately, one recent book is committed to a less abominably assumptive approach to human existence. Like Nazaryan, artist, author, and cab driver Dmitry Samarov also experienced a childhood in Soviet Russia. And I suspect that this background is one very salient reason why Samarov’s insights into everyday life in Chicago are so real and winsome, rather than trite and didactic like Foer. Eschewing prepackaged claims of Taxicab Confessions authenticity (although the show is mentioned twice), Dmitry Samarov’s Hack (University of Chicago Press, $20) is a slim yet thoughtful volume on what it is to live as a taxi driver. The book bristles with an intriguing street poetry, referring to a gas station’s “welcoming neon glow” as “fool’s gold” when Samarov describes the difficulties of finding a place to relieve himself and depicting the unusual dernier cri (“a straw cowboy hat and a green Day-Glo bracelet”) which elude the monied charlatans who hole themselves up in vacuous manses. Samarov is clearly interested in people, but, like the prostitutes, the journalists, and the psychotherapists who cater to their clients in similar fashion, he knows very well how his fares perceive him. He registers his observations in a rapid-fire yet unpretentious manner (many of his anecdotes originated on a blog), as if he has only a few minutes to capture a few sentences (or sketch one of the many illustrations accompanying his stories) before hustling for the next fare.

Samarov is candid enough to express his understandable self-interest, describing how he wants his cheeseburger more than an “angry man with a backpack [who] marches right up to the window and demands service” at a McDonald’s which prohibits walk-ups (and which generates a quick fare stream for wayward cabs in the area) while also showing us his reticence to reveal certain personal details to his more probing clients.

And why should the hack spill? After all, when we enter a cab with the idea of entering a conspiratorial trust with the driver, how much of our taxicab conversations do we truly remember? Isn’t there something inherently troubling about placing our trust with a stranger like this? Perhaps. This may be one of the reasons why so many “confessions” of this sort often depict the taxi driver as some dutiful stoic who has seen it all. But this take severely underestimates the hack’s ability to understand the implications of his observations. As Samarov himself writes when trying to peg a woman pushed into the back of his cab by a disheveled old man, “There’s no polite way to broach such a subject, so I content myself with speculating.”

Samarov is willing to impart his fears and dangers, even when they reveal unexpected thoughts about on-the-job dignity. Of dealing with incompetents and ireful types on the road, he writes, “I wouldn’t be caught dead out here if there wasn’t money at stake. The fact that the masses submit to it of their own volition makes me question my membership in the species.” Does this need for the take, often ruthlessly pared down by a cashier when checking the cab in, make Samarov any less superior to Foer? Not at all. But it’s refreshing to see Samarov marvel at the universe even as he seems conflicted about it. It’s this marvelous duality of being alive that books, especially in the hands of the prissy and the uptight, too frequently take for granted.

* And if you’re truly on the fence about whether or not Foer is a loathsome human being and/or an astonishingly overrated individual, consider the fact that Foer had the audacity to apply, and win, one of the coveted Cullman Center fellowships (which awards a $65,000 stipend, an office, and considerable resources to each winner) offered by the New York Public Library this year — this when Foer himself owns a $6.75 million brownstone in Park Slope (purchased in large part through the family’s coffers), is doing extremely well with the Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close film rights and foreign sales, and this after Foer’s equally pansified wife, Nicole Krauss, won a Cullman grant two years prior to her husband. A source informs me that Foer resigned from the fellowship, which explains why his name is no longer listed among this year’s fellows. Still, why would any remotely decent person do this? I suspect the answer is quite self-explanatory. If you go for an evening stroll through Prospect Park, especially when it is colder and more desolate in the wintertime, you can listen to the gelid pelt of Marie Antoinette-like sweat oozing from the west without surcease from Nicole Krauss’s privileged pores, which is siphoned into a special stock for the children so that they too can sup from the free ride tureen well into early adulthood. Given all the recent dialogue involving the richest 1% taking everything from the remaining 99%, it’s astonishing that the Foer family’s unrelenting selfishness and unfathomable avarice has gone without remark or rebuke by the literary community. But I digress.