Stefan Kanfer 29 February 2016
An Ignorant Time
A once-great magazine reflects how far cultural knowledge has fallen.
An Ignorant Time
A once-great magazine reflects how far cultural knowledge has fallen.
Last week, newspaper city rooms were alive with the sound of schadenfreude, and Twitterers tweeted about the latest display of ignorance in Time.To watchers of newspapers and newsmagazines, the incident came as no surprise. During the still-young millennium, ad dollars have fled from traditional periodicals to television and the Internet. Result: Shrinking readership, diminished staffs, and outsourced research. In Time’s case, the publication relied on a data-compiling site, the Open Syllabus Project, for a list of the most-read female writers in college classes. Number 97 was Evelyn Waugh. The trouble is, Waugh was a male.
As a former Time reader, for one, and as a former Time writer and editor, for two, I can testify that my colleagues and I were quite familiar with the great comic novelist. We knew no writer sharper
or funnier than Evelyn Waugh when he satirized upper-class excess in Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, and Black Mischief. The demolition job on the press in Scoop, a dazzling take on Italy’s 1936 war on Abyssinia as seen by a group of mendacious British newsmen, has never been equaled. I wouldn’t hire a writer who hadn’t read Scoop; it remains the manual on the malpractice of journalism across the pond and in the colonies.
For the record, should anyone be taking notes on Liberty Street, Waugh was described by Edmund Wilson as “the only first-rate genius the English have produced since George Bernard Shaw.” (A parenthesis for present-day Time employees: Edmund Wilson was the most prominent American literary critic to work outside the academy, writing on subjects as diverse as trends in current fiction, Freudianism, and the Cold War.) Gore Vidal later cited Waugh as “our time’s first satirist.” (Vidal was a prominent American novelist, playwright, and acidulous political commentator.)
When the dustup hit the Net, one of Twitter’s most popular commentators, Matthew Yglesias, owned up to his ignorance like a man—an unlettered man. ...
-go to links-
As a former Time reader, for one, and as a former Time writer and editor, for two, I can testify that my colleagues and I were quite familiar with the great comic novelist. We knew no writer sharper
or funnier than Evelyn Waugh when he satirized upper-class excess in Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, and Black Mischief. The demolition job on the press in Scoop, a dazzling take on Italy’s 1936 war on Abyssinia as seen by a group of mendacious British newsmen, has never been equaled. I wouldn’t hire a writer who hadn’t read Scoop; it remains the manual on the malpractice of journalism across the pond and in the colonies.
For the record, should anyone be taking notes on Liberty Street, Waugh was described by Edmund Wilson as “the only first-rate genius the English have produced since George Bernard Shaw.” (A parenthesis for present-day Time employees: Edmund Wilson was the most prominent American literary critic to work outside the academy, writing on subjects as diverse as trends in current fiction, Freudianism, and the Cold War.) Gore Vidal later cited Waugh as “our time’s first satirist.” (Vidal was a prominent American novelist, playwright, and acidulous political commentator.)
When the dustup hit the Net, one of Twitter’s most popular commentators, Matthew Yglesias, owned up to his ignorance like a man—an unlettered man. ...
-go to links-
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