Photos from the Stoney LaRue con­cert at Joe’s in Chicago last Thurs­day now have a home.

Pity the long lead. Quick on the heels of Michael Hirschorn’s Atlantic attack on “quirk” comes a sim­i­lar effort by Melvin Jules Bukiet in this month’s Amer­i­can Scholar.

Hirschorn’s piece saw quirk every­where: in books, movies, and pre­em­i­nently in public radio’s This Amer­i­can Life. Bukiet’s arti­cle goes after some­thing he rather clum­sily calls “Brooklyn Books of Wonder”:

Take mawk­ish self-​indulgence, add a heavy dollop of creamy nos­tal­gia, season with magic real­ism, stir in a com­pla­cency of faith, and you’ve got wondrousness….BBoWs are escape novels, albeit gar­nished with intel­lec­tual flour­ishes. They’re kitsch, which Milan Kun­dera defined as “the trans­la­tion of the stu­pid­ity of received ideas into the lan­guage of beauty and feel­ing [that] moves us to tears of com­pas­sion for our­selves, for the banal­ity of what we think and feel.”

But though the éminence grise in Bukiet’s account is Paul Auster, not Ira Glass, it’s clear that he and Hirschorn are talk­ing about the same thing. Sev­eral names (Jonathan Safran Foer, Dave Eggers, McSweeney’s) show up in both accounts. And their diagnoses—in Bukiet’s words, vanity mixed with “mock-naïve astonishment”—are pretty much the same.

I wrote before that Hirschorn went too soft on the soft­ies. Bukiet’s not going to let them escape so easily:

Cod­dled and cos­seted, they’re the first gen­er­a­tion of nov­el­ists who grew up read­ing the young-​adult pap that they’ve now regur­gi­tated with a decon­struc­tive gloss learned in col­lege. Of course, such aspi­ra­tions require equiv­a­lently high sub­ject matter. Hence the BBoWs’s mock encounter with enor­mity. Still, they have no teeth. They’re sheep in wolves’ cloth­ing who manage to write about bad things and make you feel good.

If Bukiet strikes deeper than Hirschorn, it’s prob­a­bly because he work­ing in fields not far from the better-​known writ­ers he’s aiming at.

In his column today at the NYT, Thomas Fried­man writes:

We have to show [China] what Wal-​Mart is show­ing its competitors—that green is not just right for the world, it is better, more prof­itable, more healthy, more inno­v­a­tive, more effi­cient, more successful.

Fried­man wants to go green. He knows that the threat of global warm­ing is real. He chas­tises the fed­eral gov­ern­ment in gen­eral, and the Bush admin­is­tra­tion in par­tic­u­lar, for not doing enough to try to stop it.

But what Fried­man, ever gleam­ing in his Pan­gloss­ian naivete, doesn’t seem to under­stand is that his pre­scrip­tion for fight­ing the prob­lem dumps us right back into the think­ing that caused the prob­lem in the first place. If the bottom line is the bottom line, if the ulti­mate arbiters of every polit­i­cal deci­sion are eco­nomic values—profit, inno­va­tion, effi­ciency, success—then we leave our­selves help­less in the face of prob­lems that can’t be—or aren’t*—adequately described in eco­nomic terms.

(photo by Bob Daemm­rich)

Random House has announced the pub­li­ca­tion of Norman Mailer’s new book of—wait for it—theology. (In an eerie echo of the Neale Donald Walsch fran­chise, the book is titled On God: An Uncom­mon Con­ver­sa­tion). I sus­pect that ghost­writ­ing for Jesus gave Mailer the sense that he was up to the task—in a pub­lic­ity inter­view for that book he said that being a celebrity had given him “a slight under­stand­ing of what it’s like to be half a man and half some­thing else, some­thing larger.” But this new book, which promises a series of “Platonic dialogues” between Mailer and his lit­er­ary execu­tor, still seems a bit much.

A real the­olo­gian I know who’s seen an advance copy of the book says that Mailer’s some­thing of a Gnos­tic. Accord­ing to the publisher,

Mailer estab­lishes his own system of belief, one that rejects both orga­nized reli­gion and athe­ism. He presents instead a view of our world as one cre­ated by an artis­tic God who often suc­ceeds but can also fail in the face of deter­mined oppo­si­tion by con­trary powers in the uni­verse, with whom war is waged for the souls of humans.

In other words, a God who sounds a lot like Norman Mailer. Those per­ni­cious con­trary powers better find them­selves a pew to pray on quick…