Siegel and Irwin

I suppose I should be more interested in the Lee Siegel fiasco, but I’m not. His work was hit and miss for me. His TV criticism was unreadable mush—the prose equivalent of cold mash potatoes. His art criticism at Slate was a little livelier, although it’s entirely possible that I was just reacting to the pictures (as I’m prone to do). As for his much maligned culture blog, well, I looked forward to reading it, but mostly for its sheer ludicrousness. When Siegel wasn’t aggressively boring, he was a pretentious poser of the first order, a preening, class-A snob whose best shtick was when he would drum up outrage over either some long-past-accepted inoffensive trend (baseball caps) or spew snooty, elitist bile about something with which he was inextricably linked (the internet). Rude? Self-important? Comically overwrought? Check, check, and check. But it was also pretty amusing. Still, it's not anything I'll miss.

On a different recent-news note, it’s worth holding a moment of blog silence for Steve Irwin. I’ve never been much for fad TV, but Irwin was delightfully mad—a larger-than-life adventurer and risk-taker for the post-risk era. He was goofy, lovable, and—unlike so many other trendy, irritating TV personages—pretty much impossible to dislike. And while his manic persona could’ve easily slipped into self-parody or brute obnoxiousness, he always skirted the obvious pitfalls of TV hosting, mostly by virtue of coming by his overwhelming enthusiasm honestly. No matter what, you always knew he really believed in the crazy stuff he said and did, and that he said it and did it not as part of some calculated scheme to get attention any way possible, but out of an true-blue compulsion for wild adventure and using thrills to educate the public—exactly the opposite, in fact, of Lee Siegel, who, even if he believed his puffery, always seemed more interested in provocation and curmudgeonly posing than anything else.