My Favorite Punching Bag

It has been a while since my favorite punching bag, Maureen Dowd, has written something that's moved me to elucidate ( I had to try and use a word she might have chosen, when I "tell you" might do.) why I don't like her. 

Usually, when I manage to look at a Sunday column (she only does one column a week) it's a screed about Trump and Republicans that I don't need to read any more of. She can't be a happy person with all that bile swirling around in her intestines. But give her credit. She hasn't moved to Ireland and joined Rosie O'Donnell on a podcast, despite her red hair and Irish heritage.

President Trump asked about Rosie, shook his head. "I don't know. Maybe she's got Trump derangement syndrome." Soon to be added to the "International Classification of Diseases?"

It is refreshing to see Maureen hasn't changed when she's not giving Trump an enema She drops more names than pushing the Manhattan white pages off a desk. (Do they still print phone books?)

This Sunday she gets off the venomous Trump trail (although he does make his way into her column slightly) and reacts to the recent story about how males don't seem to be reading fiction. Women readers account for 80% of the fiction readers. Obviously there's something to this, right? "Attention, Men: Books Are Sexy!"

The hoped for trend to get males to read again will be pushed forward by the upcoming Netflix miniseries, "Sex in the Stacks," set in the main branch of the New York Public Library on 5th Avenue, NYC. Wait for it.

The article Maureen takes up the cause for is a December 7, 2024 NYT Guest Essay by David J. Morris titled: The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone.

I love when the NYT accompanies a story with a graph or a cartoon that echoes the theme of the article. Mr. Morris's story is illustrated by a male, dinosaur skeleton in a museum indicating that prehistorically they once wrote. It's a gem.

Just how really worried we all should be is open to debate. Mr. Morris teaches writing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and tells us the male/female ratio in his writing classes has skewed heavily toward women in the last 20 years. This alarms Mr. Morris, and apparently Maureen.

I'm sure factors not named by Mr. Morris can be causing this, but whatever it is, it should scare us. I'm not sure I can feel fear in this observation. Pandemics, fallout from a nuclear blast, terrorists, might be more of what might worry me, not enrollment in writing classes, or the fact that now more of the best sellers on the NYT (of course) best seller lists are skewed heavily toward women writers these day. 

Mr. Morris claims the shift to more women writers, thus more women readers, is probably a good thing. But get this. He follows with the following flashing red light:

"But if you care about the health of our society—especially in the age of Donald Trump (there's that guy again) and the distorted conceptions of masculinity he helps to foster—the decline of literary men should worry you." 

Wow. When you put it like that...Real men don't eat quiche; they don't write fiction like they used to; they don't read fiction like they used to. Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio? Okay. Next.

But back to Maureen and her name and place dropping.

•Maureen was once seated next to Mike Nichols, the prolific filmmaker and theater director, at a dinner in L.A., who let it me known to her that his favorite novel was Edith Wharton's "The House of Mirth."

Maureen's memory is phenomenal, since Mike's been dead since 2014, so this encounter had to be some time ago. Was he just trying to get in her pants?

If Oscar Levant once quipped that he knew Doris Day before she was a virgin, I knew of Mike Nichols before he went onto all those films, plays and awards. I remember when he and his partner Elaine May appeared on network variety shows and talk shows in the '50s doing satirical comedy sketches that probably wouldn't be very funny today, but did refrain from using the word "fuck" repeatedly.

BTW, Elaine May is still with us at 90. She won't get to read it, but there's an advance obit awaiting her demise, and maybe even a front page, below the fold placement in the NYT with a black and white photo from the '50s. Still, hang in there, Elaine.

•Maureen tells us she too, she has read the book, "over and over, finding it a great portrait of a phenomenon that is common in politics. Someone makes a wrong move and is unable to recover, slipping into a shame spiral. (This does not apply to Donald Trump.)" There's that name again.

Since Maureen only writes a column once a week, my guess is there is lots of free time to revisit these classics and read them "over and over."

•She tells us she interviewed Tom Stoppard in Dorset (my guess Vt., or could be the U.K.) a few years ago whose house has a "romantic-looking bookcase full of first editions of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens." He complains of being constantly burglarized. By guys wanting to read I guess.

•She tells us it is ensorcelling when she "interviewed Ralph Fiennes and it turned out that he loves Shakespeare and reciting Beckett at 3 a.m. under the stars." With no complaints from the neighbors I guess, because either he does this quietly, no one bothers Ralph Fiennes when he gets in a mood, or he lives in isolated surroundings.

I've commented in other postings that Maureen is one writer who will send me to the dictionary, and enscorcelling did it. (My blog tells me to check this spelling. It is right, and way beyond the words they have loaded into spell checker. No doubt Maureen must be a formidable opponent at Scrabble,) Definition: enchant, bewitch; fascinate, words of course that escape Maureen's use because she went to J-school somewhere.   

Jimmy Breslin, or Hunter S. Thompson would have said of Maureen that they are someone who reminds them of someone who went to college. Why enscorcelling, when "delightful", or even "wonderful" would do?

No need to be reminded. Maureen will do it for you. She tells us that late in life she "wrote about how getting my master's in English literature from Columbia underscored for me that "we need the humanities even more when technology is stripping us of our humanity. 

Works like "Frankenstein" and "Paradise Lost" shed light on the narcissism of the powerful male tech geniuses birthing a world-shattering new species, A.I." Only guys are coders?

Another wow. Well, when you put it like that...

Maureen peppers the article with her encounters with Susan Sontag, and Richard Babcock, a former magazine editor and novelist who taught writing art Northwestern. Maureen knows these types.

I don't remember seeing the essay by Mr. Morris. Given its title. I would have quickly skipped it. Maureen doesn't mention a more recent article in the NYT (of course) on July 3, 2025 by Joseph Bernstein: "Men are leaving fiction reading behind. Some people want to change that." I do remember seeing that one, and I skipped it because of the title. Did not interest me. Pegged it for more psycho-babble from the NYT.

But now I dive in. A bit. Mr. Bernstein relates the story of Yahdon Israel, a 35-year-old senior editor at Simon and Schuster who asked at the first meeting of his book club for men to bring a favorite work of fiction. Not all brought an example of fiction.

Mr. Israel, no stranger to organizing book clubs, organized this specific book club for heterosexual men last December in an "effort to inspire heterosexual men to read more fiction." He solicited guys over social media. He got seven to show up.

Mr. Bernstein tells us of Mr. Israel, "for the second meeting he assigned a story collection by James Brinkley, "A Lucky Man" which examined contemporary masculinity. For two hours they discussed the book."

I'm not familiar with the book, but it really must have gone deep into their psyches and dredged up some awful memories. Mr. Bernstein tells us, "the next day Mr. Israel had a panic attack. Two days later, he said, he was diagnosed with depression.

"He has spent months since grappling with painful realizations that came out of the discussion, about how toxic masculinity has harmed his own marriage, especially the idea that real men do not share their feelings. It was an epiphany out of James Joyce, unlocked, he said, by that conversation in the book club." Poor bugger. He answered his own question of why men aren't reading the stuff.

Personally, I wouldn't go near James Joyce with reading glasses. I do read books, fiction and non-fiction. As a teenager I read nearly all of Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis, a little Hemingway; of course "Catcher in the Rye," "Catch-22", and I'm sure other books I've forgotten.

Currently my taste is less literature and more what I'm sure the intelligentsia (translation: people I don't know) would classify as non-literature; however, still books, by real authors like Carl Hiaasen, Ben Macintyre, Scott Anderson and Margalit Fox. Lately I'm diving into "Bluff" by the recently departed, Jane Stanton Hitchcock. I'll also read books about odds, probabilities and risk taking. Gamblers.

By guess is these selections would not get me into a book club discussing things that send readers to a therapist. I don't care.

Maureen can't help but keep us informed about the people she hangs out with—Mensa types, I guess. After her master's she tells us a "New Yorker named Paul Bergman emailed her an invitation to his book club—all men, lawyers and a judge who had gotten to know one another from the Brooklyn U.S.  Attorney's office. Bergman wrote her 'for the past 45 years we've been sharing our thoughts on books we've read. Would you join a few sessions on "Middlemarch'?' Jesus H. Christ! You mean that book written by a woman with a guy's name?

Maureen tells us she did join. No doubt another column is cooking somewhere, where she'll tell us what smart occupations the attendees held, or retired from, if one of them is using "a Caran d'Ache fountain pen with a six-sided barrel" (must be rare and expensive) to take notes, what they had to east and drink, and what the view from the window looked like.

I can wait.

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