Running for Your Life: In Reply to Roz Chast

On the Manhattan-bound R Train, Union Station, Brooklyn, two elderly bookish white New Yorker women are loudly comparing the merits of two prominent Malcolm X life story accounts, the Marable http://amzn.to/dry2Jz and the Haley http://bit.ly/68w4Ha, the morning of the planned execution of accused Georgian cop killer Troy Davis, a black man widely believe to be innocent.

“THEY THREW HIM OUT OF HIS OWN RADICAL GROUP, THE NATION OF ISLAM!” one woman says (it could be one or the other of them is hard of hearing), paying no nevermind to the hard-staring young African-American man across the aisle.

Seriously, who doesn’t like Roz Chast, New Yorker cartoon chronicler of not just these tone-deaf gals on the R Train, characters freeze-framed in that gloomy nostalgic time when the Bronx and the Hudson (for context, read, “Shadows on the Hudson” by Isaac B. Singer http://nyti.ms/oYmsii,) were defined by its darkly idiosyncratic Jewishness, with more than their share of Rothian self-loathing, in her case limned with sterling wit, the cartoons, at their best, I first saw in the vein of very good Woody Allen?

Ah, but in RC’s case there is no jump to “Midnight in Paris.” Instead, we remain in the prototype apartment, say under the Brooklyn Cyclone, Mom the apron-wearing, jokester-tyrant, love-twister at the vortex, holding court, super-charging the air.

In the Sept 26 Style Issue of The New Yorker, Page 90, RC takes on the blogger. According to her “Blog Breakdown,” the blogosphere is taken up with “1/3 stories about crap somebody cooked, knitted or sewed, 1/3 self-promotion and 1/3 conspiracy theories.”

She has a point, of course, Roz does. But it’s a little out of date. Given her fixation on nostalgia that doesn’t surprise me. And, yes, her core readers of 50 and up New York intellectuals and Malcolm X book regurgitators are getting older but in their demographic, and with modern medicine being what it is, they are likely to be with us and buying The New Yorker (on subscription, if not on the newsstand!) for another generation at least, which is job security gold for RC who will be churning out her clever alter cocker (reminds of my favorite alter cocker moment, an elderly man, not looking uncomfortable in a wheelchair, sitting in a garden with some less than aware pals in what I surmise must have been on the grounds of his condo in Battery Park City. He is craning his neck at a sharp angle where he is enthralled with the view of a young, attractive stark naked couple full on in the art of intercourse, an athletic nature, multiple positions, I don’t know when our hero, the lone alter cocker, picked up on the action, but while M and I were there it had to be twenty minutes of viewing time, during which the AC never stopped grinning) material for as long as RC wants to; or as long as she can stomach the Conde Nast relocation to 1 World Trade, why I find the idea of Roz having to actually go to the office and deal with some tomfoolery Conde Human Resources mumbo-jumbo as being Grade A Roz Chast New Yorker cartoon fodder . . .

All of which is to say RC is, of course, entitled to her opinions about bloggers. But I can’t help but consider the smugness factor. Even, dare I say, more than a touch of insecurity. Better to tar bloggers with the brush that they are trafficking in self-centered cant and whacko conspiracy theories, in so doing ridiculing the very practice of online commentary that does not fit a tidy cultural norm, with the result of driving more readers to places of real substance (David Remnick, Ha!) and uncanny wit, the cartoons of RC.

I know defending bloggers is a bit like the Russians keeping the Lada factories open. Or as a twentysomething photo assistant said about a request that I made of her that she’d forgotten and needed to be reminded of. “Oh, L, that was so two hours ago.”

Blogging may be so 1999, overtaken as it’s been by Facebook, Zynga Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn. But it has a place. I mean some of my best friends are bloggers. If RC were a blogger I’d love to read her stuff. Though I’d still be a big fan of her cartoons. No hard feelings.

Next: Running for Your Life: Country Roads, Finally