SUBSCRIBE NOW WELCOME BACK. Do you want to continue reading where you left off? New Republic subscribers can pick up where they left off no matter which device they were previously using. SUBSCRIBE NOW

Go Home Quote of the Day, Overwriting Edition

JONATHAN CHAIT JULY 16, 2011

Quote of the Day, Overwriting Edition

BY ISAAC CHOTINER

[Guest Post by Isaac Chotiner]

From Charles Blow in today's New York Times, recounting a trip to the south where he spent time with blue-collar workers (the title of the column, 'They, Too, Sing America,' was admittedly fair warning):

They are honest people who do honest work — crack-the-bones work; lift-it, chop-it, empty-it, glide-it-in-smooth work; feel-the-flames-up-close work; crawl-down-in-there work — things that no one wants to do but that someone must.

They are women whose skin glistens from steam and sweat, whose hands stay damp from being dipped in buckets and dried on aprons. They are men who work in boots with steel toes, the kind that don’t take shining, the kind that lean over and tell stories when you take them off.

Get a hold of yourself man!

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS

Show all 24 comments

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

24 comments

Poetry, sheer poetry. Of the kind "I love hard work, I could sit and watch it all day". Oh, so you didn't mean writing over something that came before, you meant "over-writing", as in way too much purple prose. I suppose so.

- AllanL5

July 16, 2011 at 12:31pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

It's a truly staggering piece of fulsome writing. Just incredibly bad. Patronizing too. At no point does Blow ever actually quote anyone. Not a single person. No one even gets a description. The first third is a self-celebration of the writer for mixing with the salt of the earth, common folk who he then describes in the rest of the column via excruciating kitsch prose and cliches. This blog is fond of 'Big Lebowski' references and clips, but Charles Blow may very well be the Barton Fink of our time. A perverse, but nonetheless amazing achievement.

- mtinora@me.com

July 16, 2011 at 12:45pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Now, to write a poetic description of Charles Blow slaving over a hot keyboard, dredging his soul, chiseling deep inside the mystery of ancestral memory to create this homage to the working person, shimmering with sweat as her hands knead the flesh of Gaia - to the inkpot I must!

- Sophia

July 16, 2011 at 1:14pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Priceless, Sophia! I nominate you for comment of the month.

- liberalref

July 16, 2011 at 1:42pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

So I guess only the South has "everyday" people? The rest of us are part-timers?

- santoast

July 16, 2011 at 2:11pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

OK, question--Is your (poster *and* commenters) real objection to the writing, or to the people he's writing about?

- colablease

July 16, 2011 at 3:39pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Oh come on colablease - both Isaac and the commenters are quite obviously mocking the hilariously patronizing tone of Blow's description. As santoast wisely points out - Blow's people don't even exist. Except in his mind as he struggles heroically along in his unheated coldwater flat...on the Upper West side.

- WandreyCer

July 16, 2011 at 4:19pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

These boots are made for talking.

- koppgeo

July 16, 2011 at 4:27pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

If Blow wants to see somebody doing " things that no one wants to do but that someone must," all he'd have to do is go find the nearest janitor.

- whyamihere

July 16, 2011 at 5:28pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

The column reminds me of this Monty Python sketch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPSzPGrazPo&feature=related

- tmmats

July 16, 2011 at 5:50pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Don't disagree about Blow. But the most bizarre post has to be by Tom Ricks that JFK was the worst president. Ever. Ricks draws a straight line from Bay of Pigs, to Vienna, to the Cuban missile crisis, to Vietnam, to, well, it's unstated, but the fiasco in the middle east. I sympathize with what Ricks must have witnessed in the middle east, but to lay the blame on JFK? He was president for 35 months, for God's sake. Now as much as I may believe GWB was the worst president, ever, if he had been president for only 35 months, no, not the worst president, not by a long shot. Unfortunately for GWB and the rest of us unlucky bastards, he was president for 8 years.

- rayward

July 16, 2011 at 7:05pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

I dunno, shoot the messenger if you must, but the message that working people of the non-high-tech white collar variety are getting screwed into the ground while Washington is gripped with the desperate need to protect the incomes of the wealthiest -- and that this is being completely overlooked and ignored -- is spot on.

- roidubouloi

July 16, 2011 at 8:15pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

roidubouloi, The messenger didn't bring back a message. There was absolutely nothing - not a single thing - in that column that couldn't have been written (by an admittedly atrocious writer) without having gone down South, without having met or talked to a single person. It's thus a textbook example of how not to report. The fact that the topic is so important (that working people in the South and elsewhere are in dire straits and are all too often ignored by our political and economic elites) just makes the pathetic, arguably patronizing job Blow did all the more awful. Again 1) He wrote a risible column in horrendous purple prose. 2) He failed to give the people he's ostensibly celebrating and reporting on the rudimentary respect of actually quoting them. He didn't even giving the reader one - not one - specific detail from any one of their lives. He went with an idea; he came back with something he could've easily (alas, all too easily) written without ever having gone. Any of us could've written that. The only specific news about the trip we got was that he had taken it. That's just embarrassing. Not only do Times readers deserve better so do the people he ostensibly is reporting on. Perhaps in future columns Blow will actually discuss and detail people he met and tell us about their lives in 2011. If he wasn't already planning on doing this I would strongly suggest he do. Good intentions are not enough.

- mtinora@me.com

July 16, 2011 at 9:28pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Great take down, Grimes. Anything - literally anything - provides roid with a hook to preach his Manichaean, quasi-Marxist gospel. The inanity of Charles Blow will do as well as anything else.

- liberalref

July 16, 2011 at 9:38pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

I am peeved and I am going to start posting my peeve on every comment. I have a subscriiption to TNR. Everytime I log on to the online edition of TNR I am bombarded by advertising junk of the most irritating, tiresome sort. I once was told I had to put up with one such incident as the web site could not tell I was a paid subscriber. In the last five minutes of trying to read and comment I have been mosquito whined about five times. Is TNR going broke? Going senile? Out of control? Should I cancel my subscription? On topic: in my youth I worked on a Chevrolet assembly line, putting bolts in bumpers. I guess that made me a member of the "working class" (for about three months). I was offered a management track job and turned it down, losing my opportunity to be one of the ruling class. Now I am in the irritated with TNR Subscriber class.

- skahn

July 16, 2011 at 10:22pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

OK, I am less peeved so far today. The deconstruction of Blow's column proves that racism is about over. Well, as TNR recently described, transgenders are the new oppressed minority.

- skahn

July 17, 2011 at 1:22pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

What an absolute blowhard. I bet Blow has to google 'Big Lebowski' references, too.

- W_Bombay

July 17, 2011 at 3:13pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

I think I've got a Pravda, or is it The People's Daily, with that same story somewhere. Since when did the 'we don't need no stick'in help' people of the south need a propaganda story written about them?

- jet

July 17, 2011 at 3:49pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Grimes, if you are getting attaboys from the liberal reformer, our local loser and economic dunce, time to think again. I am not defending Blow's writing, but the point he did make, that non high-tech workers are being screwed and no one in Washington appears any longer to given a damn (not the many did to begin with), is important. That so many would spill so much ink on the literary criticism while the substantive point gets no notice or attention is depressing. Should we be worried about the writing (the horror, the horror!) or about the genuine and widespread suffering, in our wealthy country, with no hope in sight? If that constitutes a Manichean view of the world, as the hapless and witless lib charges, then count me guilty.

- roidubouloi

July 17, 2011 at 6:35pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Here's George Packer in today's New Yorker covering some of the same ground and doing it well. http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2011/07/25/110725taco_talk_packer

- AaronW

July 18, 2011 at 12:45am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

It is important ground - but all labor is important and meaningful. Unfortunately, we now value cash much more highly than craft and sweat. That dehumanizes us all.

- Sophia

July 18, 2011 at 3:24am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

I appreciate all of the eat your peas posts about the sad facts unlying the teasing about the writing. I tend to assume these things go without saying in the mostly preach to the choir (so eloquently!) crowd around here, but witty reparte among educated elites (face it, own it, don't even deny it) surrounding those that have less than us should always be conducted with our humility and humanity openly showing. I think it did - because liberal patronizing clearly galls many of us almost as much as conservative viciousness. Both are dehumazing, distancing and erase the dignity of human individuality from anyone involved. Those of us that mocked Blow's writing did it out of anger at that dehumanizing, however well intentioned. No one has the right to steal anyone's individuality. James Baldwin's description of Ralph Ellison as "too angry to live" comes to mind.

- WandreyCer

July 18, 2011 at 10:04am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

No point in comparing Packer to Blow. The mere existence of the former makes the literary point. Packer's understated criticism of Obama is more devastating, not least for its brevity. than pretty much all of what has been written here at TNR in the articles, blogs, and posts.

- roidubouloi

July 18, 2011 at 10:30am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Wow. The Packer piece is excellent. Great link.

- mtinora@me.com

July 18, 2011 at 12:12pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

SHARE HIGHLIGHT

0 CHARACTERS SELECTED

TWEET THIS

POST TO TUMBLR

SHARE ON FACEBOOK

Close