A friend and I were just talking about Susan Faludi's dreadful sounding book, The Terror Dream, in which she apparently argues that 9/11 was an excuse to push women back into the kitchen. The New York Times book review is savage, making it sound as if Faludi has taken one tiny core kernel of truth--that 9/11 caused women's issues to recede into the background, along with every other issue that didn't involve religious fanatics who wanted to blow up Americans--and enlarged it 80 or 90 times until the whole thing is a vast right-wing conspiracy to do women wrong. I am working on my own book proposal, Ring of Fire, in which I explore the myriad ways in which the 9/11 backlash prevented my landlord from repairing my malfunctioning stove burner.
This brought us to Susan Faludi's home page. Apparently the best pull quote she could come up with is one from a Newsday reviewer, which celebrates Ms. Faludi's allegedly elegant prose by attempting to pen one of the worst sentences in the history of the english language:
“Journalism is her splendid trade. Susan Faludi listens like a tuning fork, and picks up unseen vibrations. There’s not a subject that she touches on that she doesn’t illuminate in prose as graceful as a gazelle.”
If she listens like a tuning fork, that means she's only sensitive to one narrow frequency and ignores everything else.
I dunno, it has a certain translated from a Godzilla movie quality that I like.
Haha, I agree with Greg.
And the book proposal is brilliant. Let me know if you need an awkwardly structured review praising your eloquence and meter.
Tuning forks don't listen. Tuning forks resonate.
Does she sting like a butterfly too?
So if you were to re-write that quote using normal words, you'd say that "Susan listens like someone who does not in fact listen at all, but only repeats the same narrowly defined message over and over again."
So if you were to re-write that quote using normal words, you'd say that "Susan listens like someone who does not in fact listen at all, but only repeats the same narrowly defined message over and over again."
Maybe the Newsday reviewer was smarter than we thought.
Sorry. To illustrate the atrociousness of the writing, you had to quote THREE sentences, each building upon the previous to achieve that climactic stench. No one of those sentences taken alone rises above (or rather sinks below) the mere unfortunate.
Listens like a tuning fork? Did one single copyeditor ever look at that metaphor and ask "what the hell is that supposed to mean?"
If that metaphor were any more tortured, Amnesty International would be lodging a formal protest.
Or maybe something like this, sam:
"Susan listens like someone who does not in fact listen at all, but only repeats the same narrowly defined message every time you smack her with the ball of your hand."
Tuning forks produce one note. The same note, every time.
Most of the gazelles I have seen on television are in the process of being eaten by something. Graceful? Don't know.
That was a self-refuting endorsement.
Great, but I get the impression you haven't read the book or even skimmed it. I haven't either, but I'm not making fun of it on the internets.
I haven't read Faludi's book either, but her claims about captivity narratives are suspect, based on the ones I read as an English major. Most famous of the "white woman captured by savages" is Mary Rowlandson, who was not physically rescued by white men but ransomed through the fundraising efforts of Boston women. Women's captivity narratives actually worked against patriarchy by demonstrating that women survived men's failure to protect them -- that is, that women didn't need the implicit bargain of male protection in exchange for female obedience.
There are some books where it is sufficient to read the author's own description and realize that if that's the best that can be said, this book is crap.
"Susan Faludi listens like a tuning fork" is worthy to stand alongside Paul Anka's "When I move, I slice like a ****ing hammer."
This is, indeed, gag-inducing; yet Faludi's website provides links to numerous other reviews, among them Katha Pollitt's and Barbara Ehrenreich's, which are written in grammatical English and give a much better sense of what the book is actually about.
Listens like a tuning fork? Did one single copyeditor ever look at that metaphor
Yes, but the copy editor previously worked for NYT's editorial department, during which time said editor gradually developed an eye condition known as the Friedman Blindspot.
the Friedman Blindspot.
Heh. Did you see Friedman's latest stroke of genius -- "E2K"? This apparently has something to do with the world being flattened by olive trees falling on Lexuses.
Maybe it's a literal translation from the Japanese. It can't be English. These people are professionals. They have editors.
I thought I recognized this style of writing, and it turns out that the writer is John Leonard, a freelance reviewer who happened to write the New York Times review of "The Terror Dream" this time around. According to the Times, he reviews books for Harper’s Magazine and television for New York magazine.
This quote is from a review he wrote of "Stiffed" in 1999.
Geez, is Faludi still playing that gig? That's basically what Backlash was about except that the scapegoat for the nonexistent backlash was Reagan instead of jihadists.
A tuning fork does indeed listen: to itself. The review is therefore accurate.
Faludi went onto TPMCafe to promote the book and for a site that's pretty lockstep liberal, it's surprising how much people went after her BS for basically being all in her head and unsupported by anything in observable reality.