the NYTBR now lumps all its contributors together up front in the section (on page 4 today), along the lines of the NYRB, New Yorker. must be the new highbrow rule. queenan is described like this:

JOE QUEENAN'S "Queenan Country: A Reluctant Anglophile's Pilgrimage to the Mother Country" will be published in November.

hum. sounds remarkably self-involved, as niche as Jacobs is broad. maybe someone should review it for... i dunno... Entertainment Weekly???

I'm with you, Daniel, I read Entertainment Weekly and am an avid celebrity hound. So, lay off the celebrity magazines, Joe.

At the same time, however, I think that Queenan's hit upon something with his phrase "pedigreed simpleton," used for people who have excellent cv's but can't do much more than make pop culture references.

To my mind, one should strive for a pleasing balance of both crap and substance. People who know both sorts of things make the best and most entertaining conversationalists.

Hmmm. Both you and MY say: "Well, I have read the Russell..." Which I guess implies you haven't read Proust, or maybe just the first book. How any smart teenager could not be drawn to a piece of art with a title referencing Sodom & Gomorrah is beyond me. Times have changed, I guess. Used to be fun looking for the dirty stuff.

I don't read People, EW, or TV Guide. Nor watch the Daily Show. Ain't got no culture.

As I recall, EW was not exactly soft on the encyclopedia guy either. I suspect Queenan took the book more seriously than the book took itself. Not, that I have any intention of wasting time on it. That's what EW is for - it's a useful weekly summary of crap that I don't want to waste time actually seeing. Plus, it allows one to keep abreast (heh heh) of the celebrity titty parade without purchasing any of the fine fine products those spokesbreasts are representing.

TV Guide, on the other hand, hasn't been useful since 1981.

Mr. Queenan didn't bother to mention what was wrong with the Greenland description (Greenland was forested in the west when the Vikings found it. They stayed there long enough to have their own bisphoric before the ice and the Aleuts finally overwhelmed everything.) so one wonders if he has holes in HIS knowledge.

I freely admit to holes in my knowledge of philosophy - mainly because I've spent too much time studying war and history. To each his own and all that.

I suspect that JQ complaint is that Jacobs is too smart-asses to display proper deference to people at New York City cocktail parties held by 'intellectuals'.

ash
['Maybe Queenan hopes Jack Nicholson will play Queenan in a movie.']

still i have to admit that was a wonderfully written polemic that left one with a vivid image of both the writer (clearly an insufferably pretentious guy who thinks he knows a lot more than he does) and the target (also probably insufferably pretentious in a different and equally annoying way)...

I think you're all missing something. People who are inclined to learn things can learn them from reading Proust, Russell, Entertainment Weekly, or the Yellow Pages. People not so inclined will avoid becoming educated whether they attend Harvard or the local junior college. Increasingly the purpose of higher education is not an education but training, rather like performing seals.

Put please don't compare the Daily Show and EW. I know that tastes vary, but the former has wit, the latter has t-ts. I do agree though about pedigreed simpletons, which I attriubte to the emergence of SAT tutors for the upper upper middle class and the dumbing down of college curricula. I have reguarly encountered these types in my classes. I find it very discouraging that the SAT, which was intended as a levelling tool, has become yet another instrument of privilege.

For a real hoot, read Russell on Nietzsche. Very embarrassing.

As MY points out, the benefit of Russell is that he reads well. Most philosophers can't write worth a crap and their subject matter is just plain difficult. Wittgenstein, anyone? What a joyous read he is.

This may be just the sort of thing an open source, but not quite wiki, approach could sort out. You need specialists to accurately cover the ideas of the players, but no single body can be that good with all of them. Getting open agreement between specialists on connecting themes while might be a way to go. That should only take you a zillion years or so with good software and high rates of participation ...

Busting on the book for being comedic and juvenile is pretty silly. Reading the whole encyclopedia is a pretty funny thing to do. ''Bouvard and Pecuchet'' is a comedy too.

Truth be told I've met Mr. Queenan (and in fact appear in one of his books) and he is both surprisingly nice and surprisingly knowledgable and "educated"; God help us if he typifies TV Guide writers.

In a more civilized generation, we believed in the adage, "if you can't say something nice, don't say anything".

One strongly suspects one of Joe's books got a bad review from EW.

The hidden gem of the review is the educational "pedigree" of Mr. Jacobs: Dalton and Brown. These are not random choices; both schools are quite distinctly the most experimental, progressive, and flexible (I choose words they would both use honorifically) of their kind, and both utterly abhor anything remotely resembling cultural literacy or a core curriculum. And both, as Queenan shows amusingly, reap their empty but just rewards.

I second Ash's view -- Queenan appears to have taken this book much more seriously than its author ever did.

What I find interesting is that Queenan appears to believe that a real "education" is based on the study of philosophy, literature and art -- and he makes no mention of science, mathematics and engineering. Presumably because he knows nothing about those topics but still wants to believe that he's "educated."

Queenan also appears to believe that something is famous if he and his friends have heard of it.