Morris has done an extraordinary amount of research into this case, conducting interviews with everyone who was involved in the case and survived to the time of his research, and quoting extensively from those interviews. He went through the evidence with a fine-tooth comb and did all the due diligence and, from all I can tell, cannot be faulted on research.

Yet — and this may just be because I am not a true crime gal — I was overcome with a bad case of premise denial. (That’s a term I made up to refer to the reading experience where you simply cannot suspend disbelief sufficiently to enter into the world of the book.) It wasn’t that I couldn’t believe in the possibility of Jeffrey MacDonald’s innocence. It was that as I read more of more of these infinite minutiae relating to his case, I couldn’t believe how much ink and time and outrage has been spent on this one guy, this one case.

Errol Morris says that people believe MacDonald is guilty because the alternative, believing that he watched his family get murdered and then spent twenty-five years in prison on a false conviction, is too awful to contemplate. But like — and again, maybe I am being too cynical here — don’t we all already know that? If we don’t know it about MacDonald, we know it about the criminal justice system. Someone was falsely convicted in America and didn’t get a fair trial? FETCH MY SMELLING SALTS. And like, would we be having this fit of the vapors if Jeffrey MacDonald were black?

Said Jenny the cynic.

And I didn’t like The Journalist and the Murderer that much either. So.

Hands up if you’ve ever served on a jury! And if not, have you ever been cut and they told you the reason why? I was once cut for cause (no reason given! should’ve asked!) and once my case settled before the jury got impaneled. And I just got called for my third-ever round of jury duty, so we’ll see how that goes.

The post A Wilderness of Error, Errol Morris appeared first on Reading the End.

In my professional career, academics have occasionally been really, really snotty to me when I didn’t deserve snottiness. This isn’t a judgment on academics. When you work with a very large number of people from any demographic group, it is statistically likely that a couple of them will be jerks. But still: I have sometimes asked an academic a simple question, and s/he has responded with — instead of an answer to my question — a paragraphs-long, sarcasm-and-righteousness-laden treatise on his/her mistreatment at the hands of academic publishers like the one I worked for, the entirety of the scholarly community in that discipline, the university departments, or some other entity I was also not in charge of. It was punching down, because I was the lowliest of worker bees (especially early on), it made my day shittier, and I very very rarely had any power to fix whatever the problem was.

In other words, a girl on my career trajectory is maybe not the target audience for Dear Committee Members.

Jason Fitger is a divorced creative writing professor at a small liberal arts college in the Midwest. His department is facing cuts. His next novel is going nowhere. His personal life is a mess, and his favorite creative writing student has lost funding. He’s raging against the world, and the world is going to hear about it, in every recommendation letter Jay is ever asked to write.

Dear Committee Members is good satire in that it points up many of the real, true problems of academia: ballooning numbers of adjunct faculty, reduced support for liberal arts, apathetic students, incompetent department chairs, the frustrations of using buggy online databases — these are all real frustrations. Jason Fitger writes the way angry liberal arts academics write, so Julie Schumacher is super successful on that front too. Nor does his unrelenting snarkiness in letters of recommendation imply fundamental nastiness: He writes warmly of his hardworking students, and even more warmly of those of his past and present colleagues whose work  he respects.

I fear, though, that it’s a case of premise denial (a phrase I coined to describe that thing where you can’t suspend the requisite area of disbelief to enjoy a book). Like my dog Jazz when the guard dogs of Up start barking ferociously on screen, I was unable to convince my brain that this was not a real person aiming real vitriol my way. I kept having stress reactions as if it were real. I kept thinking that I wished Jay Fitger would consider before stamping and mailing these letters that they were about someone and to someone, and not always did both of those someones merit the level of inventive negativity that was going into them. And also I kept thinking I HATE YOU WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME PLEASE STOP I HATE YOU.

The book deserves more than two stars on its merits, but it and I just weren’t meant for each other.

Linda Holmes of NPR recommended Dear Committee Members. The other book she recommended that I read was Eleanor and Park. So I have learned the valuable lesson that while I may have overlapping literary tastes with Linda Holmes, they are definitely not coterminous. Good to know.

The post Review: Dear Committee Members, Julie Schumacher appeared first on Reading the End.

So here is why, in spite of its charming qualities, I am not reviewing Attachments: If I worked at a company that monitored my email, and if in spite of that fact I persisted in sending very very personal emails to my coworker/best friend all the time because I guess I didn’t want to send those emails on AOL or whatever people were using in 1999, and if then the person that monitored company email turned out to be reading my emails all along and developing a crush on me on that basis, the only single response that I could possibly have to that would be, “Ew, never contact me.” That is an irredeemably creepy thing to do, and having the guy feel guilty and worry that it might be creepy does not make it uncreepy, and having the girl whose email is being read develop an in-person crush on the guy who’s reading her email to the point that she follows him home one time also does not make it uncreepy.

Because nothing in the world could make that uncreepy. Because it is really creepy.

However, the people have been saying that Rainbow Rowell’s new book, Eleanor and Park, is delightful in all the ways that a book can be delightful, and I am posting this post to let you know that apart from the irredeemable creepiness of Attachments’ premise, which kept me from engaging with it in any meaningful way because of what I will from now on call premise denial, I could definitely see the potential for delightfulness and emotional truth in Rainbow Rowell’s writings. So I will still read Eleanor and Park when it comes out here, and maybe you should too.

Your takeaway from this non-review post: I made up the term “premise denial,” and you should all use it.

The post Not a Review: Attachments, Rainbow Rowell appeared first on Reading the End.