As self-respecting people who just want to improve our English, we are supposed to resist as a matter of principle the blandishments of the scandal magazines and tabloids. But it looks like Laura Kipnis, a radio/TV/film professor at Northwestern University in the United States, has done a respectable job giving some smarts and, uhm, respectability to the subject in her recently published book
How to Become a Scandal: Adventures in Bad Behavior (Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company, 209 pages), so we might as well take a peep at whatever enlightenment the book has to offer us.
In a review of
How to Become a Scandal in the September 24, 2010 issue of
The New York Times, columnist Susan Dominus says that Kipnis has come up with a “scandal psychodynamic” that soberly outlines the relationship between the transgressors and a judgmental society, justifying the unseemly effort by saying that the “transgressors need the exposure as much as the culture needs scandal.”
“What fascinates Kipnis are the elaborate ways those transgressors reassure themselves that they are not bringing colossal ruin upon themselves, that their dalliances will never see the light of day, that no one will ever trace the source of that condom-filled card,” Dominus explains.
According to Dominus, Kipnis’s book is stuffed with witty insights about the human motivations that lead to scandalous behavior. “But for the most part,” she says, “she treats her subjects with remarkable compassion, using their failings to illustrate our own potential for the same, ridiculing the idea that the rest of us are above sordid self-immolation.”
Read Susan Dominus’s “They Did What?” in The New York Times now!Read an excerpt from Laura Kipnis’s How to Become a Scandal now!ABOUT THE AUTHOR:Laura Kipnis is the author of
Against Love: A Polemic and
The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability, books that have been translated into 15 languages. She is a professor in the Department of Radio/TV/Film at Northwestern University, has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, and has contributed to
Slate,
Harper’s,
The Nation, and
The New York Times Magazine. She lives in New York and Chicago.
DEEPER, MORE SERIOUS READING STUFF:In “How to ask awkward questions and annoy people,” an essay that he wrote for
Spike Magazine, Angus Kennedy says that the Athenian philosopher Socrates made many enemies in his endless, often exasperating pursuit of Truth. But, Kennedy asks, “Was Socrates really so intolerable? Intolerant of Athenian democracy’s belief that the many had the wisdom to judge, was he a threat to democracy itself? Was he guilty of asking too many questions?” Kennedy’s essay provides some provocative answers.
Read Angus Kennedy’s “How to ask awkward questions and annoy people” in Spike-Online.com now!
