Just Shoot Me

September 25th, 2009 § 4

Is this my first Shoot Me of the year? If so, it’s mighty late in coming. Though this one’s joyous, even funny: I am head over heels with Adam Gopnik, with his piece on Dan Brown— and think no one need ever bother to write again. To wit—in every sense of the word—

The clichés line up outside the dust jacket and are whisked in pairs to a table down front …

Couldn’t you just die? Of course The New Yorker always did have the funniest writers around.  It’s just that Gopnik’s talent seems somehow … unnecessary. Do we really need such wit and seriousness and, above all, profligacy?

I hardly think so.

… modern Masonry borrowed some oogah-boogah from the Egyptian past …

You can see how annoying this kind of thing might be. Especially if you subscribe to the theory that there is only so much wit to go around, and each remarkably well-turned phrase is one less than will ever dribble out of your own imagination.

Or perhaps it’s like life. (Ya think?) Where other people’s boyfriends, houses, writing are always so much more well done, which is why any food someone else cooks for me is so mysteriously delicious. It’s not envy, per se, or rather one is envious of the chimera, the let’s-pretend world where nice things like treats and finished novels appear quite magically.

I don’t know about you, but I’d go quite mad if I couldn’t maintain this childish belief. Rather than diminishing one, it seems to sustain at least part of the ability to go on when the going on isn’t fun. When real difficulties arise—have I underscored the paradox till you’re sick of it?—the idea of ease, of sentences like these flowing from one’s fingertips, it’s like the carrot. “… the driver would tie a carrot on a string to a long stick and dangle it in front of the donkey, just out of its reach. As the donkey moved forward to get the carrot, it pulled the cart and the driver so that the carrot would always remain out of reach,” says Wikipedia.

The text regularly lurches to a stop, with the generosity of a third-grade teacher on a class museum outing, offering bits of research and history. Much of it is bogus, to be sure—though modern Masonry borrowed some oogah-boogah from the Egyptian past, it was an Enlightenment club … which was about as sinister, and secretly controlled about as many governments, as the Royal Order of Raccoons in “The Honeymooners.”

If you are too young to catch the allusion, don’t come crying to me.

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