purejuice | MEGO Ledes: 'I Want To Be a Happy JAP'

Much as we might rag on it, the awful truth must be looked at head-on: Reality TV, that fiction of verisimilitude, is, even for people who read W. G. Sebald and enjoy grim Scottish films with subtitles, supernally addictive.

-- Daphne Merkin, Dream Girl, The New York Times Magazine Women's Fashion Supplement

Daphne Merkin is the least talented most often published writer I know. She's like the Heidi Montag of journalism.

This lede is just so wrong in so many ways -- so assholic New Yorker, so deeply unfunny and witless in a way only the Times lets middle-aged women be (Joyce Wadler! Alex Kucynski!), a true discredit to her race -- I can't even begin to unpack this for you. Like network TV and the deeply boring W.G. Sebald and Trainspotting are not fictions of verisimilitude?

Because all the hip people in the universe are, like me, watching RuPaul's Drag Race and nothing else. Rag on Ru? Are you shitting me? You want fictions of verisimilitude? Baby, Ru -- who places himself, as a drag mama, at "just under 300 years old" -- has been dishing fictions of verisimilitude since -- We're born naked and after that, it's aaaaaaaaaaaall drag. Tatiana gave the best discourse on gender I've heard in 20 years the other night on the reunion show.* Addicted to season 453 of the Housewives of Orange County, as Merkin thinks she's being hip to claim? Dude, you'd have to be in a medically induced coma.

Well, there you go. There's a certain class of girls, let's just leave it at that, I went to college with them, for whom Valium is a way of life.

Oh my God Oh my God Oh my God, she says it! I actually read the rest of the piece, which is deeply, deeply loathsome, almost reptilian, as is Merkin's wont. And she says it! I want to be a happy JAP!!!!!

It's almost as good as being a deeply repellent stoned one.

My. eyes. glaze. over.

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* She felt she had been disrespected as a queen by the others carping on how she was only just a pretty face. As long as I've got a dick between my legs and a wig on my head, I'm a drag queen. (Authenticity as drag queens -- not transsexuals, or God forbid, women -- being one of the electrifying subthemes of the show.)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Re: RuPauls' Drag Race:

Raven, I feel, was robbed.

you think? i don't know, it was a hard choice. i think she was a little too -- teflon/energizer bunny? and the other tyra was more....Real?
bwahahahaha!
this is why i love it. and ru, who says what's it all about? magic!!!!

Good to know I'm not the only person on the planet who's been obsessed with RuPaul's Drag Race, and that it's apparently the hip thing to do (like it actually mattered - drag queens+music+dancing+RuPaul= high camp at its' finest.

And I agree about Raven - when she wasn't being a total catty bitch, she had depth and complexity - plus she made me laugh, which always counts for something. Tyra was pretty and that was about it.

hey hipster! i liked raven a lot, but thought tyra (see comment above) seemed both sweeter and more like a round the way girl.

She was sweeter toward the end, and when she talked about her son, but she needed a serious dose of charm school in the beginning. As for Raven, he had me when he was talking about how he watched his mother get her heart broken when his parents divorced, and he's been in that same position in every relationship he's been in...I was right there with him.

oooo, i missed that ep -- he softened up!

"Daphne Merkin is the least talented most often published writer I know."

I despise her. I don't just mean I despise her writing, I mean I despise her, personally, courtesy of every last bit of information she's ever volunteered about herself. I get the feeling sometimes she knows how much she's disliked by others and gets off on it.

ohhhh, that's a creepy and excellent insight. she's awful and she does get off on it. in this piece she describes herself as wearing an exceptionally ugly outfit....agrrghhhh.

p.s. let's SPANK her.

I was JUST about to mention her I-did-not-need-to-know spanko crap (yeah, you're so out there for that, Daphne, spend five minutes on the Internet and then get back to me). Emotional masochism played out in public so all us readers get a chance at "beating" her.

Her last name is merken for f's sake. nuff said.

of all the names made up by sadistic migra officials on ellis island, this may be the meanest. or maybe daphne chose it.

To me the worst part about such writing is the clubby "we" tone of voice. "You know we all love to rag on reality TV, but you also know that we're all addicted to it." Bitch, I read W.G. Sebald and I don't have a TV. The...presumption that I'm like you that permeates such a sentence just telegraphs your inability to empathize as a writer or as a human being.

(I personally don't find Sebald boring, but I do find reality TV boring. Diff'rent strokes.)

There's also the have-my-cake-and-eat-it-too name-checking of Sebald in the first place. The smart money says that she's also had an uncracked copy of Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita on a shelf somewhere for more than a decade. She's just one of those.

The smart money says that she's also had an uncracked copy of Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita on a shelf somewhere for more than a decade. She's just one of those.

Ooohhh BURN SAUCE! Love it.

precisely. all that [pedestrian yet snotty yet unhip] name-dropping is what i mean about assholic new yorker. don't do it unless you're really hip.

what??? you're not watching HGTV? TRANSform me? ru????? basketball wives?

MEGO Ledes: 'I Want To Be a Happy JAP'

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