From a New Yorker interview with the writer Lorrie Moore.
The last question in the interview is about something Moore wrote in the New Yorker last month about finding Trump's voice "reassuring." I blogged about that here. The interviewer, the New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman, informs her that "The response on Twitter was censorious" and asks her if she felt "misunderstood." She says she felt "misread" and, in fact, "Not really read at all."
I only meant to present some self-mocking, cock-eyed optimism.... I was a little rambling and wrote past the assigned word count, so things had to be removed from every paragraph. But the point at the beginning is that, if you are in the next room, feeling mildly deranged, and can’t hear the words, the potus can sometimes sound like Merv Griffin or Mel Tormé: one hears a crooner’s croon. This is not praise. This is noting a sound... Twitter’s feeding frenzies seem a display of people with obscene amounts of time on their hands, yet a disinclination to read in any real way. And it seems possible that this one was triggered by the right to get the left to eat its own....ADDED: The 7th comment at my blog post about Moore's meditation on Trump's voice — from commenter eric — was "She's about to be cancelled and will soon apologize."
AND: If you write about politics and don't say predictable things in an obvious way, you will be misread and read in a way that's well described as not really read at all. But that makes it even more important to keep writing where you don't belong, in that world that is simultaneously beautiful and unwelcoming.
