Oprah a god?

[Breukelen advocaat]

MAGAZINE REVIEWS
Back-to-school issues
(Magazines reviewed: The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Magazine, The Washington Monthly)
by Seth Rogovoy

Along the way, Prose skewers Maya Angelou's writing, which is at the top of most high-school reading lists. About Angelou's "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," she writes, "To hold up this book as a paradigm of memoir, of thought - of literature - is akin to inviting doctors convicted of malpractice to instruct our medical students."

:thumbsup:



Back-to-school issues by Seth Rogovoy

[gabee42ee]

Samwhores right and i dont get it my mom watches her everyday and the bitch never watches t.v. and no one can talk while its on. and once in a while i catch a episoid and it amazes me when mad people come on the show talking about how she really changed there lives. I meen its good shes helped so many people but i dont get how watching a show can change ur life?

[birdgirl73]

Are you a reader of books both modern and classic, Breukelen? I'm just curious about whether you do indeed read. I've seen you quote Nietzsche and cut and past other e-text. But I'd like to know if you ever sit down with an open mind and simply read. (I'm not asking about magazines or periodicals. Actual books.)

I hope you'll do some research into how Nobel and Pulitzer literature awards are nominated, selected, and awarded. Those are very thorough and balanced selection processes, as are other book awards like the Caldecott Medal, Newberry award, and PEN/Faulkner awards, among others. The early nominations often do involve politics, but the selections are generally very thoroughly vetted by educated, critical-thinking, respected readers and thinkers in the literary world.

Oprah may be famous. And she is certainly full of herself (most corporate chieftains and celebrities are). But I challenge you that someone of only average intelligence wouldn't be nearly as interested in books, in the condition of the world, in the promotion of education, and in doing as good a job running the huge corporation that she does. If you deem her show only as being about lowbrow culture, you've not ever watched it, I suspect, or have only done so very recently. The shows she's done on societal issues and problems affecting people are anything but lowbrow. Recently, I get the feeling that she's increasingly letting her subsidiary Dr. Phil producers tackle more and more of those societal/family/women's issues while she seems to be moving after more celebrity interviews, which I regret greatly. But her past work has included some socially important pieces: stories about female genital mutilation, abuse of various kinds, education, parenting issues, health care here and in other countries, political situations here and in other countries, and many more.

You never fail to baffle me. This time, the hardest-to-reconcile part of your comments was the quick dismissal of Oprah as only producing or understanding lowbrow culture. Yet you're the one who sees intellectual and cultural "wisdom" in The Kid From Brooklyn and has posted numerous links to his comments. It strikes me as terribly ironic that you'd characterize another "broadcaster" as lowbrow if you venerate that man as much as you seem to.

[napolitana869]

I am not a fan of dr. Phil at all.

[Breukelen advocaat]

Are you a reader of books both modern and classic, Breukelen? I'm just curious about whether you do indeed read. I've seen you quote Nietzsche and cut and past other e-text. But I'd like to know if you ever sit down with an open mind and simply read. (I'm not asking about magazines or periodicals. Actual books.)

I hope you'll do some research into how Nobel and Pulitzer literature awards are nominated, selected, and awarded. Those are very thorough and balanced selection processes, as are other book awards like the Caldecott Medal, Newberry award, and PEN/Faulkner awards, among others. The early nominations often do involve politics, but the selections are generally very thoroughly vetted by educated, critical-thinking, respected readers and thinkers in the literary world.

Oprah may be famous. And she is certainly full of herself (most corporate chieftains and celebrities are). But I challenge you that someone of only average intelligence wouldn't be nearly as interested in books, in the condition of the world, in the promotion of education, and in doing as good a job running the huge corporation that she does. If you deem her show only as being about lowbrow culture, you've not ever watched it, I suspect, or have only done so very recently. The shows she's done on societal issues and problems affecting people are anything but lowbrow. Recently, I get the feeling that she's increasingly letting her subsidiary Dr. Phil producers tackle more and more of those societal/family/women's issues while she seems to be moving after more celebrity interviews, which I regret greatly. But her past work has included some socially important pieces: stories about female genital mutilation, abuse of various kinds, education, parenting issues, health care here and in other countries, political situations here and in other countries, and many more.

You never fail to baffle me. This time, the hardest-to-reconcile part of your comments was the quick dismissal of Oprah as only producing or understanding lowbrow culture. Yet you're the one who sees intellectual and cultural "wisdom" in The Kid From Brooklyn and has posted numerous links to his comments. It strikes me as terribly ironic that you'd characterize another "broadcaster" as lowbrow if you venerate that man as much as you seem to.

I've "baffled" a lot of people.

I never knocked Oprah's generous contributions to charity - but Dr. Phil? He's her toady and has sold out his life to her.

Lowbrow entertainment is fine sometimes. I like The Three Stooges, but they're beneath the Marx Brothers. The Kid from Brooklyn's fifteen minutes of fame is over.

I have read works by Swift, Twain, Chaucer, Dickens, Hemingway, Shakespeare, Poe, Mencken, Hume, and many other writings by various novelists, historians, philosophers, scientists, humorists, critics, etc.

The worship of Oprah and her league of chosen people, such as Michael Beckwith whom I won't even comment on, is a disgrace. I am not as qualified to criticize her literary circle of friends as a person with a background in language and English is, but I know that it's junk that serves as fodder for a "diversity" agenda within the politically correct modern society.

It's sad, really, when I see masses of people that SHOULD know better buying this junk and ignoring the worthwhile artists and their work. Turn on the radio, and you hear mostly garbage - and you see the same on TV, in print, and now theyâ??re teaching it in the schools, with our tax monies. Sad, very sad.

[birdgirl73]

Now I'm baffled because I have an entire hole in my knowledge of pop or Oprah-related culture. I have no idea who Michael Beckwith is! But I'm going to look on Google right now. How did I miss this person?

Glad you've read those writers. If you've read Twain, Hemingway, Chaucer, Dickens, Shakespeare, and Poe and liked them, then you've been exposed to lowbrow ideas, scenes, and interactions in volumes. So many of their works are full of those touches. They wanted to sell books and plays just like modern authors do.

As far as radio and TV are concerned, I do watch an occasional Oprah nightime re-rerun when it's about societal matters. But I do think she's sold out in a big way recently, and I think Phil McGraw's show is becoming increasingly "Springerized," which is sad because an understanding of our own psychology is important, I think. This is why nearly everything else I watch, other than "60 Minutes" and news magazine-type shows on the networks, is on PBS these days. And the only radio I listen to other than music is NPR. I agree that there's far too much crap out there.

[birdgirl73]

Oh heavens no. A spiritual guru? So this person is being promoted on Oprah or other shows? Someone tell me quick. This is the sort of thing I miss while I'm at school all day and wouldn't linger on if I ran across it. But it worries me.

[Skink]

I really never watched her tv show and don't even think of it when I think of her... She is amazing to me because of her conviction and making her dreams happen,,,She should me a role model for that alone...

[Chronic Chrissy]

Oparh has done many a great things and raised awearness to many areas of our worlds realitys that we in this culture overlook. She does enough celebrity nonsense to maintain her adiences and snag new veiwers then hits them with issues that they would other wise turned away from or not be at least minimally introduced to. She started from the shits and worked her way up which is to be respected along with overcoming her own personal trials to better herself. She may be ging a little overboard but wouldn't you if the oppertunity where there? Plus she helps draw attention to new products and small growing bussinesses often started by regular people with a goal who took a risk to get somewhere in life. I don't live by her but I do take what I can from her to better myself and my life much as I do in every aspect of my life. If you don't admit you have growing to do, you never reach for the light and stay stunted, while everyone around you takes what you sacrifice.

[Mrs. Greenjeans]

The books and authors that you are espousing as worthwhile would have been tossed in the trash by him.
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Stupidity at work
by James Bowman

Stupidity at work by James Bowman

........What can account for such a lamentable failure of literary perception? The answer is hardly far to seek, and is neatly summed up in a brave piece in the September Harperâ??s by Francine Prose, â??I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read.â?� That brilliant title, just a smack at Maya Angelou, is both a positively Angelouvian mixed metaphor and a synecdoche for Miss Angelouâ??s disastrous influence on the teaching of English in this country.

Basing her assessment of that influence on the experience of her own two sons and a collection of some eighty high school reading lists, Miss Prose deplores the â??lemminglike fervor with which our universities have rushed to sacrifice complexity for diversity.â?� The result is that kids have â??slogged repeatedly through the manipulative melodramas of Alice Walker and Maya Angelou, through sentimental, middlebrow favorites (To Kill a Mockingbird and A Separate Peace), the weaker novels of John Steinbeck, the fantasies of Ray Bradbury.â?�

.......The result, as we now see, is that we have books about irony by twenty-four-year-olds whose knowledge of the subject comes from television and whose bibliography does not include even the names of Chaucer or Cervantes or Molière or Voltaire or Dryden or Swift or Pope or Johnson or Dickens or Twain. What he sees as the â??ironyâ?� of â??Seinfeldâ?� is actually, like that of so much of the popular culture (see, for example, Kurt Andersenâ??s new novel Turn of the Century, which is full of it), a double ironyâ??irony about being ironic. This undercuts (as it is intended to do) the moral seriousness and purpose of simple irony and so produces the Seinfeldian nihilism which is what Purdy really objects to. I suppose it is something to be hopeful about that the moral hackles of this â??Generation Xerâ?� (a title which, to give him his due, he deplores, though Douglas Couplandâ??s name does appear in the bibliography) have been raised, but it would make us feel a lot better if we thought he knew what they had been raised about

Unless your real name is James Bowman, this means nothing to me in the context of this debate. I want to know why YOU, Breukelen, feel the way you do. Don't be upset simply because you gave a pat answer, and I asked you to explore it further with me. I merely seek to understand.