Tag Archives: Mark Goldblatt

Fiction, Reviews

‘My Life As a Dixie Darling,’ by Mark Goldblatt

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When it comes to living our lives, I’m sure that the vast majority of us are making it up as we go along. “Lunatics, lovers, and poets.” …of the people I’ve known, they are the only ones who are certain about what they’re doing. But with all due respect to Shakespeare, I wouldn’t trust any of them to babysit my kid.

Occasionally I refer to the late D. Keith Mano, a somewhat tragic author who tried to write fiction about sex from a Christian perspective. I think he deserves a better posterity than he’s enjoyed so far, but I’m also not sure he ever really hit his target. I heard a critic say once that almost every great filmmaker tries to do a movie about sex at some point, to infallibly fail miserably. My friend Mark Goldblatt has written a novel about softcore porn in My Life As a Dixie Darling, and I think it mostly works.

The year is 2007. Doreen Martinelli is a very pretty wife and mother living in Shreveport, Louisiana. She’s married to Bobby, a fairly feckless man-boy who works on and off as a car salesman. They’re just getting by financially, and Doreen worries about how they’ll eventually pay for their young daughter Arielle’s college education.

Then Bobby has a brainstorm. There’s a porn site called “Dixie Darlings.” It runs on (I assume; I have no personal experience here) the same general principles as OnlyFans – a woman posts her pictures and film clips, and subscribers pay to see her nude in the member’s section.

Doreen is, of course, shocked and offended. At first. But Bobby is persistent. She isn’t a prude, is she? She’s a beautiful woman. He’s not jealous. And they could make enough money to send Arielle to Harvard, potentially.

That’s what gets to Doreen. She’d be doing it for Arielle. Who would it hurt?

Little does she know. She adopts the name “Dee-Dee” and posts some photos. The response is astonishing. Before long she’s the second-most popular Darling, and rising fast. But that means competition with the Alpha Darling. Plus the constant risk of the neighbors finding out. And Arielle getting teased at school. And Bobby becoming a seduction target for other women.

…As well as a weird flirtation with the boss’s son, an intelligent, well-educated dwarf.

The overall theme in My Life As a Dixie Darling seems to be materialism – the American tendency to justify any moral compromise – even when it leads us to neglect our children – so long as we can tell ourselves it’s for the children’s sakes. I also appreciated the unexpected complexity of the characters. This is one of those stories where there are no real villains, though many of the characters certainly do wrong.

I wasn’t entirely sure about the ending. I guess it should be seen as a peculiarly American kind of tragedy, but in a light-hearted way.

Recommended. Cautions (surprise!) for adult situations.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘I Feel, Therefore I Am,’ by Mark Goldblatt

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The third of postmodernism’s triumvirate of stooges, Michel Foucault (1926-1984), focuses his indignation on common sense because it carries “the tyranny of goodwill, the obligation to think ‘in common’ with others, the domination of a pedagogical model, and most importantly—the exclusion of stupidity.”

If like me you’ve read Francis Schaeffer and Allan Bloom, and if you’ve pondered C.S. Lewis’s “The Poison of Subjectivism,” you’re aware that the central intellectual battle of our time rages around Reason. Does reason give us a window on reality, something conccrete on which we can fully rest our weight, or is everything “subjective”; is one person’s world entirely different from another’s? Is thinking worth anything, or must passion rule all things?

My friend Mark Goldblatt, novelist, columnist, and educator, provides a useful guide in his recent book, I Feel, Therefore I Am: The Triumph of Woke Subjectivism. The book offers a short historical overview of how the Enlightenment came to enshrine Reason, and then how a rising tide of Subjectivism gradually infiltrated our institutions of higher education, turning the culture of the mind into streams of thought that must ultimately run dry.

He examines Critical Race Theory, showing how it employs Subjectivist philosophy to exalt feeling over fact, turning the quest for knowledge into a quest for raw power (because once reason is dead, we can’t have a discussion. All that’s left is a shouting match. And after shouting come fists). He goes on to outline how the Me-Too movement corrupted its honorable ideals by abandoning objective standards of justice, and how more and more people, in the spirit of transgenderist dogmatism, are now destroying their own bodies.

He ends by suggesting some means by which our schools of liberal arts, having become divinity schools of Woke religion, might be amputated and allowed to wither, before they can poison the whole body.

This book is only six months old, but it might possibly already be too late. The schools of the STEM disciplines, in which the author places much hope, seem to be already in the process of corruption, embracing Woke mathematics and physics (Want to fly in an airplane designed according to Woke math principles? You first; I’ll wait).

Still, I Feel, Therefore I Am is a worthwhile introduction for the thoughtful reader desiring some points of reference in the churning sea  of Relativist culture. I enjoyed it and recommend it. Cautions for some rough language.

Non-fiction, The Press

‘Right Tool for the Job,’ by Mark Goldblatt

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Right Tool for the Job

The headphones jerked out of my ears, and I made a grab for them, which caused me to trip over my feet, fall onto my side, and shoot off the back of the treadmill, knocking over two young women in spandex outfits who’d been chatting behind me. As one witness said, it looked like I was picking up a six-ten spare.

Yes, I’m blogging through The Lord of the Rings, and I’ll be back with that momentarily. But my Facebook friend Mark Goldblatt announced a deal on his book Right Tool for the Job: A Memoir of Manly Concerns, and I figured it wouldn’t do me any serious harm to take a break between hobbits with a short, light book. I did, and it didn’t.

Right Tool for the Job is a collection of humorous essays, sort of an autobiography under strobe light. We begin with an awkward memory of Mark’s father taking him to a Turkish bath, and end with a meditation on giving up softball because your body’s just getting too old for the punishment. A recurring theme seems to be the unlimited indignities men’s bodies impose on them, with particular emphasis on sexual awkwardness, though all the stories aren’t about sex, and honestly, what else is a guy going to write about?

Author Goldblatt is Jewish, secular, and conservative. He’s also extremely funny. I laughed out loud more than once. I recommend The Right Tool for the Job, with cautions for mature themes. I especially recommend it to women, as an introduction to what’s laughingly known as male psychology.