The good news is that this morning I found an item on the Internet about Mary McCarthy. The bad news is that it’s by Camille Paglia. I didn’t know she was still around, but apparently Salon pays her for a column where she answers readers’ letters.

Paglia says McCarthy’s works were kept out of “women’s studies programs from the 1970s on” because she didn’t fit with their “maudlin, victim-centric curriculum.” Well, let’s see. Women in the 1970s had no problem making a fuss over McCarthy’s dreadful enemy, Lillian Hellman. The women included Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave, who I think must be accounted feminists, at least in those days. (The caveat is because Fonda, some 30 years on, went Christer; of course that might not rule out some sort of feminism, but I want to be careful.) In fact Fonda and Redgrave celebrated Hellman by starring in a big-budget movie that pretended, on Hellman’s say-so, that the dear lady had risked her life by smuggling money to the anti-Nazi underground thru the heart of the Third Reich. The tough, straight-talking movie Hellman squared her jaw and carried out the assignment. Some victim.

In real life Hellman had done nothing like it. She had a history of lying in print, a history that extended to her account of the supposed heroism in her memoir Pentimento. The account formed the basis of the movie, which was called Julia and now is not much remembered.

Mary McCarthy remarked on television about Hellman’s long record of dishonesty, after which Hellman sued her for a few million dollars. In this contest McCarthy did better regarding facts, Hellman regarding money. She was rich, McCarthy wasn’t, and the legal expenses clouded the last few years of McCarthy’s life.

Paglia, if she cared, might argue that Fonda and Redgrave are one thing, women’s studies programs another. Of course she’d have to explain why there was one brand of feminism for Fonda and Redgrave, and the millions of women who bought Hellman’s books and went to see Julia, and another for the academic programs. She’d also have to explain why highlighting injustice rules out celebrating heroism (or pretend heroism, in Hellman’s case).

She won’t and it doesn’t matter. She’s a fool. She even thinks Sidney Lumet’s movie version of The Group is a good movie.

Privileged teenagers at one middle school are learning to empathize this year, whether they like it or not.

A teaser from the New York Times for this article here. From the article:

Many Scarsdale parents praise the empathy focus, but some students complain that the school has no business dictating what they wear or how they act in their personal life.

Hey, good point.

Others say that no matter what is taught in the classroom, there is a different reality in the cafeteria and hallways, where the mean girls are no less mean and the boys will still be boys knocking books out of one another’s hands.

Another good point. I had to put up with teachers for many years. Most of them concentrated on history, math, reading, science, and so on. Some of them were good, not many. But there was one teacher, one special teacher, who stood out. She was my 8th grade social studies teacher and she believed in something called values clarification. It involved listening to her talk and taking part in small-group exercises that resembled checklists from Psychology Today. What I learned from her is that the windier the subject, the less interested a teacher is in results. The point is for the students to create a Potemkin Village where the teacher can be mayor.

Of course one teacher might not be enough to support such a conclusion, but this one made an impression on me.

Imagine the mass of the glove Stalin swiped across your face; imagine the mass of it.

Bad writing can make you disagree with sentiments you know to be true. For the time spent reading that sentence, I’m convinced the Soviet Holocaust was not really such a big deal. It’s an odd state of mind but one I can reenter whenever those sixteen words are before me.

The sentence is from Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, a brief historical work in which Amis squared his shoulders and looked the Soviet disaster straight in the kneecaps. The book reveals that Kingsley Amis, Martin’s father, was a Communist Party member until 1956. I find that incredible. It means Lucky Jim (published in 1954) was written by a Communist, which means that the funniest person in the world was a Communist. Then Khruschev had to go spill the beans and Amis senior abruptly gave up Communism; he also gave up being funny, but more gradually and without conscious intention.

Another surprise: Christopher Hitchens was a Trotskyite. I knew he was left, but I assumed that meant New Left. In America nobody looked toward the Russian Revolution for much of anything after the Port Huron Statement. But in ’70s London a bright young person, or at least Christopher Hitchens, could still pick a favorite Bolshevik and take him seriously.

Amis’s trick of turning the reader against beliefs the reader holds is known as the Friedman Effect in honor of Thomas L. Friedman. The effect springs into action when a writer not only does a bad job technically but also gives the impression that a belief is especially beholden to him or her for subscribing to it.

The American press tends to get the small things right and the big things wrong. The British press just makes shit up.

A small-time publisher puts out a book that’s about Beverly Hills from 1930 to 2005. The publisher already put out a book about Beverly Hills’ founding and first few decades. So:

I make a lot of noise about that damn Ted Hughes and that sillyass Sylvia Plath, and then in comments Aaron White coolly deflates me: