Bobo in Hell

This is on Book TV right now. Bobo, the Derb, and Christina Hoff Summers discuss I Am Gene Simmons. And it’s as bad as it sounds. Bobo, of course, uses this to recycle anecdotes about college students from On Remainder Tables and complain about how colleges are no longer trying to “build character,” which seems to mean “preventing them from having sex.” Summers starts off rationally, mocking Wolfe (and, by extension, Bobo) for generalized from self-selected anecdotes, but then starts (I’m serious) going on about how every woman in college is indoctrinated by Judith Butler–someone even published a Judith Butler reader!–and several years ago she won a bad sentence writing contzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. And now the Derb is, surprisingly, talking about how it’s all about homosexuality. This thing really cries out for s.z.

I would like to think that there are better literary events C-SPAN could televise instead of one that uses a terrible novel as a pretext to invite reactionaries to yammer on about the same stale hobbyhorses they would beat into the ground irrespective of the book being discussed…