Radar LARB

From Got Medieval © Carl S. Pyrdum

Christopher Glazek on why the crime rate is too low for our own good: "Statistics are notoriously slippery, but the figures that suggest that violence has been disappearing in the United States contain a blind spot so large that to cite them uncritically, as the major papers do, is to collude in an epic con. Uncounted in the official tallies are the hundreds of thousands of crimes that take place in the country’s prison system, a vast and growing residential network whose forsaken tenants increasingly bear the brunt of America’s propensity for anger and violence."

Carl Pyrdum of Got Medieval: "Me, I’m too easily distracted by the margins to be able to discuss the apparent gender ambiguity of Christ in the main image on a page and its implications for normative heterosexualized spiritual desire without going 'Hey, look, a monkey!'"

Anthony Lane skewers Madonna's W.E.: "Recent reports from Liverpool claimed that irate moviegoers had come out of The Artist complaining that there were no words in it, and asking for their money back. In the same spirit, I hereby demand a refund for W.E., because of its outrageous lack of sex. What on earth is the point of a Madonna product, in any medium, if it contains not a single orgy?"

Perry Anderson reviewing Sino-Americana: "In the years since his exit from the State Department, he explains, he has been to China more than fifty times, hobnobbing with its leaders, but his conversations with these epigones dwindle to banalities after the heights of his dialogues with Mao. The Chairman had treated him as a ‘fellow philosopher.’ Deng could not live up to the same standard, still less his successor."

Alan Levinovitz's brief history of the blurb: "In the 1600s practically everyone wrote commendatory verses, some of which were quite beautiful, like Ben Jonson’s for Shakespeare’s First Folio: 'Shine forth, thou Star of Poets, and with rage / Or influence, chide or cheer the drooping stage, / Which, since thy flight from hence, hath mourned like night, / And despairs day, but for thy volume’s light.' (Interestingly, Shakespeare himself never wrote any — one can only imagine what a good blurb from the Bard would have done for sales.)"

Klosterchuck? A comparison:

Malcolm Harris on Chuck Klosterman, 2001: "The book Fargo Rock City by Chuck Klosterman was just named winner of The ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award. I’m guessing this doesn’t mean much to more than (maybe) 10,000 people in the entire country. In fact, if you effortlessly understood 100 percent of this article’s opening sentence, you can probably skip the rest of the piece."

Klosterman on tUnE-yArDs, 2o12: "The album w h o k i l l by tUnE-yArDs was just named record of the year by voters in the 2011 Pazz & Jop poll. I'm guessing this doesn't mean much to more than (maybe) 10,000 people in the entire country. In fact, if you effortlessly understood 100 percent of this article's opening sentence, you can probably skip the rest of the piece."

And so on.