"I would like this, but with seasonal ingredients, cooked medium rare, and robbed of obvious relevance."
The other day, wandering through the thickets of a new web site catering to folks who found HuffPo insufficiently interested in starfucking, I stumbled across a snarkier-than-thou rant about food geeks. You know the aesthetic: Put-upon ironist is exhausted by the puffery of an irksome world and decides to take it down a few pegs using nothing but razor sharp wit, lots of “I” statements, and the Oxford Dictionary of Allusions. Cue eight paragraphs of stretched metaphor and thinly-veiled self-adulation on why foodies suck. Which is when it hit me — I’m sick of ranters.
It’s not that I don’t get the impulse. It’s not even that I haven’t indulged it. But it’s just so lazy. Some days, of course, you wake up and you simply can’t think of a topic. But Slate and the Daily Beast and a quote book familiarity with Mark Twain somehow rendered it acceptable to substitute an irritation instead. And the rules of the form are such that you don’t have to think about it, or report on it, or consider it: You can just rant. Riff. Write. It’s like an exhibition match where the other team doesn’t show up. And so, free from the constraints of competition and argument, the space just fills with, well, writing. Because if the rules of argumentation lift for a rant, the stony reality of a set word count doesn’t. Something has got to go where the argument was supposed to sit.
And so we get sentences like this one: “I’m sick of the foodies who need every morsel that goes into their mouth to be a Picasso painting, a Giacometti sculpture, a Proust novel, evoking the world with each crumb.” Boy, your Intro to Western Civ professor must be so proud! But while your reader is dipping her madeleine into that memorable brew, your subject is a bit, err, perplexed.
A Proust novel is rather the opposite of a morsel, no? The point of Proust is the mesmerizing quality of its totality, not the exquisite composition of its smallest component parts. (That said, I give you the point on Picasso. Deconstructed dishes are the cubism of the foodie world: Everyone acts interested, no one enjoys the product.) And indeed, Proust gets his share of complaints: Too stylized and self-indulgent. Of interest only to a small slice of the leisure class that reads for status rather than joy. It’s reverse elitism of the laziest kind, almost always lobbed by other affluent types who needed an opinion on Proust if they were to get laid, but didn’t want to do the reading.
And so it is here, where our profound finale sagely observes that “there isn’t a person on the planet who doesn’t love to eat,” an extension of one of the rant’s earlier bon mots, “it’s as if I called myself an ‘Airie.’ Because I’m simply nuts for air.” Wise stuff. Fit for a Native American proverb, or a Santa Cruz drum circle (like, if we just understood that everyone eats, and all food is equal…). Foodies should remember this lesson: Other people in the world also eat, ergo, there is no room to express interest in Alinea.
But this is the nature of “The Rant.” Having not made an argument, it can’t reach a conclusion. If your premise is “I hate bricklayers,” then expending 800 words to decide that “I still hate bricklayers” does not signal to your reader that the journey has been a worthy enterprise. And so having started in fury and traveled by metaphor, we end in banality, the whole exercise a winding effort to evade that most basic of editorial question: “So you hate foodies. And?”
11 responses so far ↓
spencerackerman // November 14, 2008 at 5:36 pm
… but I do hate bricklayers…
joran // November 14, 2008 at 10:05 pm
So you’ve written a 613 word piece that says…you hate rants!
It’s a meta-rant!
winer // November 15, 2008 at 2:25 pm
excellent rant. from what i’ve read, i would say you hate lazy writers. which is why you’re more fun to read than the daily beast…
Wrongshore // November 15, 2008 at 6:54 pm
It’s like an exhibition match where the other team doesn’t show up.
I don’t know that the article would be any better if the other team had shown up.
I think that might be called “the Internet”.
jk // November 16, 2008 at 1:45 pm
What you’re complaining about seems to me to be a further extension of the type of writing that flooded several sections of San Francisco Chronicle’s Sunday paper, such that I gave up the subscription 20 years ago. It wasn’t ranting – it might be by now – but it was just “here’s my look at this, from my perspective, which because I can write well must be interesting.” It was interesting to me for as long as I thought the authors were interesting, which wasn’t long – it was clear to me after a year or so that I wouldn’t have been interested in them as friends, so why were their opinions interesting to me? I wanted to talk at the water cooler about what I had learned, not about a reporter’s opinions. It was so over-Style-ized – the paper could have just put all these into a “Me” section that was easily tossed or read depending on reader preference, though it would have left little “news”. Friday’s Left Behind entry on Slacktivist captures this well. Writing of hero Buck’s on-camera reporting on what appears to be the start of WWIII, he says, “He’s got a camera, but instead of using it to show the explicit miracle occurring behind him, he uses it to show himself earnestly telling us about that miracle. I’d like to see the miracle, but Buck is standing in the way.”
The published rant’s just the next step in the wrong direction.
Neil the Ethical Werewolf // November 16, 2008 at 1:47 pm
You know, this post could’ve gone on your other site perfectly well.
Tomorrow Museum » Archive » Against the rant // November 17, 2008 at 12:11 pm
[...] but razor sharp wit, lots of “I” statements, and the Oxford Dictionary of Allusions” – Ezra Klein. “Having not made an argument, it can’t reach a conclusion. If your premise is ‘I [...]
sean // November 17, 2008 at 2:39 pm
Not to be an asshole, but if you’re going to poke fun at passing Proust references, you should probably get your French right: bons mots being the plural of bon mot.
Likewise, when attacking someone else’s metaphors, it’s best to remember that finales don’t observe, sagely or otherwise.
No Raves for Ranting - Ideas Blog - NYTimes.com // November 18, 2008 at 3:12 pm
[...] Internet | A ranter rants against ranting (responding to an earlier rant about “foodies” flagged here). “The rules of the form are such that you don’t have to think about it, or report on it, or consider it: You can just rant. Riff. Write. It’s like an exhibition match where the other team doesn’t show up.” [Internet Food Association] [...]
Steph Mineart // November 26, 2008 at 7:09 am
I’m so relieved. I was afraid it was my rant against foodies that you were linking to. Carry on.
Ranting « All Good Naysayers, Speak Up! // December 2, 2008 at 9:47 pm
[...] December 3, 2008 Ok, so my last post was a rant, of which I should be ashamed, after reading Ezra’s fantastic post about rants. But it reminded me to link to the post, which is well worth reading. “The rules of the [...]