UPDATE: Cross-posted at Seattlest.com, where Jonathan Raban himself weighs in with a long, delightfully funny comment (number 9). My own apologies follow.
What does the Noo Yawk Effing Times have against Seattle?
Frank Bruni, their restaurant critic, puts together a list of ten hot new restaurants around the country. Geographic balance, gotta find one in the Pacific Northwest, let's see: green corner of the country, organic is hot, women chefs are hot, anything fit the bill? Wow! A two-fer, right in Seattle: Tilth, all green and a woman at the stove to boot.
They send Matt Richtel to write about a winter's day in Seattle; he starts his piece thus: "Drink coffee. Put on another layer of dry clothes. Repeat." Hit snooze button. Repeat.
They send their "Frugal Traveler," Matt Gross, to Seattle for the express purpose of sampling happy hours. He goes to Cascadia, but finds their $1 miniburgers "bland and overcooked," even though the dollar miniburgers haven't been around for well over a year. (They're $2.50.) Don't they have fact-checkers at the Times? Or can't the Frugal Traveler afford to google "Cascadia Miniburgers"?
Which brings us to The Times's "local" observer of our local economy. The thought being that newsroom editors in New York are out of touch with what's happening around the country and can't be bothered actually reading online editions of papers in other towns or asking their own bureaus; they need "local" stories with a fresh perspective. And who better than a Hungarian-born British travel writer and novelist to spy on Seattle?
That would be Jonathan Raban, who moved from London to Queen Anne in 1990 and wrapped up a series of conflated Seattle vignettes in Sunday's paper.
Here we have the author of two overpraised works of fiction conveniently set in Seattle (Waxwings and Surveillance) writing now about a poetry-spouting homeless man, whose favorite poem just happens to be a rambling piece of proto-feminism reinterpreted as an attack on materialism (Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market"). The observer who interpreted the dot-com bust--in fiction--as a medieval morality play would now have us believe--in non-fictional reality--that Seattle is a Gomorrah of overwrought selfishness. The Gucci counter at Nordstrom's aside, Raban and his homeless alter ego paint an unreasonably upbeat picture of Seattle, lusting after expensive new baubles while the rest of the country pawns its jewelry.
The fault doesn't lie with Raban, who has every right to his vision, but with the editors who print this nonsense. Fine when a critical essay appears in a local blog like Crosscut; not so much when it's massaged for national exposure.
Posted by Ronald Holden at April 6, 2008 7:26 PM | TrackBack
The International Kitchen
Cooking school vacations in Italy, France & Spain.
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