Steyn On Seipp
Mark Steyn, who, like me, appreciates the great danger to Western life and Westerners' lives from Islam, also had great appreciation for Cathy Seipp. An excerpt from the piece he posted on the year anniversary of her death:
I loved Cathy Seipp's writing, even though much of it was in areas I usually avoid like the plague:1) She wrote media criticism, which is almost always the province of the indestructible ethics bores;2) She wrote about hanging out in a glamorous city with a bunch of vaguely cool people you've never heard of, which grates very quickly on those of us who live in obscure zip codes where nothing ever happens;
3) She wrote droll observational scenes of everyday life, like all those leaden officially designated "humorists" in every newspaper across the land trying to wring 600 words out of the amusing aspects of barcode scanners;
4) And she wrote about the funny things her kid said, which is the kind of perilous terrain that leaves even the most well-disposed reader feeling like W C Fields.
But Cathy was the exception to the rule in all the above and many other areas. The media criticism was much needed in her home state, where she was a welcome disruption to the entertainment capital's industrial production line of the world's dullest journalists. Her analyses of the Los Angeles Times-servers were dead right, but my favorite moments were when some stylistic quirk caught her eye:
I almost didn't finish reading Lopez's column today because in the opening graph he wrote that he "motored about" L.A. to hear what people were saying about yesterday's protests. Motored about? What is he now - Jeeves?
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