Jennifer Howard laughing

Jennifer Howard

Writer, editor, journalist.

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • Home
  • About
  • Blog
  • Books
  • Writing
    • Journalism
    • Fiction
  • Editing
  • Contact

What He Said

November 11, 2008

RIP John Leonard. Lots of appreciations elsewhere to which I have nothing useful to add, except to direct you to this Nation essay from 2000, which ought to be read by all working critics and reporters and the people who edit them:

I like to think of myself as having published in the New York Review, The New Statesman, the Yale Review and Tikkun. But there was also TV Guide.

This sounds less careerist than sluttish. It is, however, a sluttishness probably to be expected of someone who had to make a living after he discovered that the novels he reviewed were a lot better than the novels he wrote. We may belong to what the poet Paul Valéry called “the delirious professions”–by which Valéry meant “all those trades whose main tool is one’s opinion of one’s self, and whose raw material is the opinion others have of you”–but reporters, critics and “cultural journalists,” no less than publicists, are caged birds in a corporate canary-cage. Looking back, I see what I required of my employers was that they cherish my every word and leave me alone. If I understand what Warren Beatty was trying to tell us in the movie Reds, it is that John Reed only soured on the Russian Revolution after they fucked with his copy.

Exactly.

Filed Under: Lit Crit

Previous Post

Scholars Behaving Digitally

Next Post

Operation Paperback

Recent Writing

  • “A paler shade of white”: HAVING AND BEING HAD by Eula Biss (review)
  • “Do We Have Victorians to Thank for Consumerism?”
  • “The Complicated Role of the Modern Public Library”

Recent Posts

  • Book event: VA Festival of the Book “Shelf Life”
  • Interview: “Rising Up With Sonali”
  • Live at East City Bookshop

Get my newsletter

Get updates on writing projects. But that's not all! I will also be sharing a few bright! shiny! things! I pick up here and there as they catch my fancy.

Subscribe

About Jen

Jen Howard sitting in front of a brick wall. She is smiling.

Writer, journalist, editor, gadabout. Book- and nature lover. Washingtonian. LLC. Read more »

Latest Posts

  • Book event: VA Festival of the Book “Shelf Life”
  • Interview: “Rising Up With Sonali”
  • Live at East City Bookshop
  • The TLS: “Coming Clean” (review)
  • Vox: Quoted in an article on “The New Maximalism”

Social Media

Tweets by JenHoward
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • RSS
  • Twitter

Content is © Jennifer Howard or respective owners | Site by Rocketkoi