The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 15.1745 Friday, 17 September 2004
From: Richard Burt <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Date: Wednesday, 15 Sep 2004 08:20:03 -0400
Subject: Coring the Bard to the Maxim
"Mr. Itzkoff is an emotional young man - he got a vicious case of
shingles while he worked at the magazine - who cries early and often in
his book, and in an interview; he also quotes Iago from memory. (The
quote also opens his book.)"
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/14/books/14lads.html?ex=1096184509&ei=1&en=4a2c088b6b799835
This Lad's Life: Write, Ogle. Rewrite, Ogle. Drink, Ogle. Repeat.
September 14, 2004
By DAVID CARR
In "Lads: A Memoir of Manhood," a former associate editor at Maxim, Dave
Itzkoff, takes a baseball bat to his former employer, suggesting that
behind the facade of rollicking lads and willing females, the magazine
was a gulag where overworked and underpaid editors labored endlessly to
come up with something - anything - that would sustain the magazine's
monstrous newsstand sales.
But he reserves his most unalloyed scorn and invective for himself. When
Mr. Itzkoff, 28 and now an editor at Spin magazine, decides to open up a
vein, he uses a butcher knife. "Lads" describes the life of a hapless
schlub in romantic affairs, a charlatan in professional matters and a
loser in the game of life.
Yes, Mr. Itzkoff's tenure at Maxim, which lasted from 1999 to 2002, is
full of buffoonish editors and craven office high jinks. But these are
contrasted with his own miserable existence, full of loneliness and
extremely detailed episodes of self-gratification, as well as tales of a
father who suffers a cocaine overdose. There is the promise of fun on
the cover, but this, too, is illusory: the outlines of a condom are
pressed into the leather of a wallet, but it looks as if it has been
there a long time.
[ . . . ]
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