Why I question the NY Times' news sense...

This is incredible:

The Times has a story on page A6 today about a Kazakh filmmaker who's making a "revenge" movie -- a rejoinder to Borat -- as an attempt to salvage Kazakhstan's wounded pride and reputation.

"I want to show modern Kazakhstan as it is in reality," the director Erkin Rakishev tells the Times' Clifford Levy.

So what does this movie consist of?

The movie consists of a horny donkey which has sex with Borat's brother -- who then gets pregnant. There are naked men running through the streets and fights between grandmothers and rabid dogs.

There is much, much more...

It is quite possibly the funniest article that the Times has run in ages.

So my outraged question is (pardon the language):

How the fuck was this not a front page item?

I guess we should just be glad that they got it in at all. (Having spent my adult life working at newspapers, I know how humorless editors can be.) But, seriously, no sense of humor... none!

Marvelous Malcolm

Is Janet Malcolm the greatest American writer alive?

I sometimes think so.

No, I don't think Malcolm has ever produced anything as interesting as, say, My Life as a Man or American Pastoral. But if you look at Philip Roth's last three books, they look like a stab at former glory rather than something original and relevant. The themes seem slightly stale. The writing is a lot flabbier than it used to be.

The same could probably be said of Toni Morrison and E.L. Doctorow and many of our other great writers. It's not their fault; sometimes you've said what you needed to say.

But there are a few writers who seem to get better with age. And if you look at Malcolm's piece in the New Yorker this week (subscription required) about the trial of Mazoltuv Borukhova, you see a writer whose talents have not diminished at all. If anything, they've gotten stronger.

I realize, it's a little unfair bunching these writers in together. Fiction is a very different animal than journalism. But when the voice is as good as Malcolm's (when what she has to say feels so urgent and exciting) it's irresistible pairing the two.

The Borukhova trial, in case you haven't heard about it, was a case of a Queens doctor and Orthodox Bukharan Jew, who was accused of having her husband murdered in order to get custody of their four year old daughter.

After reading the piece, I still have no idea if the woman was innocent or guilty. I have no idea whether her husband was a monster or a saint. But I certainly think it's possible that she's innocent. It's very possible that she's guilty -- but her husband deserved it. And I can also see it as an instance in which every accusation leveled against Borukhova is correct, and that she's where she ought to be.

But whether she's innocent or guilty, it also seems obvious to me that she did not have a fair trial.

And the innocence or guilt in this case seem besides the point. What Malcolm does which is so remarkable is her unpacking of everything that happens in a trial; she goes through the motions of a trial -- its expectations, its theater, its players -- with such an eye for detail that she really makes you rethink everything. Every action deserves second guessing. Every actor is slightly different than you thought he or she was.

What Malcolm's doing is what a great artist like Roth or Morrison or Doctorow is supposed to do: She's offering a different perspective.

It really is a treat. Hats off to you, Miss Malcolm. I will always remain a devoted follower!

Doggone it!

Yes, I admit that the Times has made what one would call "interesting choices" over the years in their Jewish coverage...

But Jack Shafer is getting entirely too bent out of shape about the Hebrew speaking dog story.

If you haven't read it, the Times reported on Saturday about a bomb sniffing dog that the police got from Israel. So all its basic commands ("Stay!" "Speak!") are in Hebrew. The local cops (not Jews) had to learn a few Hebrew phrases so they could communicate with the dog.

That's a cute story, if you ask me.

The problem was not the story. The problem was that someone buried the lede on this.

The dog should have been front and center. Somehow, the piece got polluted into an article saying that, yes, there are Jews in Montana -- which, as Shafer rightly points out, is no big surprise. (Idaho? Maybe.)

And, honestly, once they told the basic story of the dog -- or at least broached the subject -- it wouldn't have been a terrible thing to write about the Jews of Montana. One of the reasons that the Jews have such an interesting story, is because they show up in so many different places, and yet seem to also keep their common identity as Jews. The Jews of Peru and Baghdad are fascinating stories. How these (sometimes hostile) cultures digest the phenomenon of the Jews is absolutely an interesting topic.

Montana doesn't quite make it... but I defy someone to tell me that the idea of non-Jews learning Hebrew to speak to a dog isn't a story!