Ouch!

You all know that dcat appreciates a no-holds-barred takedown. Over at The New Republic James Wolcott puts the smack down on The New Yorker's Adam Gopnik. To give you a taste, here is the first paragraph:

I sometimes wonder if Adam Gopnik was put on this earth to annoy. If so, mission accomplished. Mind you, he finds himself in fine company in my illustrious literary perp walk. Francine Prose, with her pinched perceptions and humorless hauteur--every time she brings out a new book (she is depressingly diligent), I find myself grumbling, "Her again?" I've never gotten the point of Paul Auster and his swami mystique and probably never shall, unless I move to Brooklyn and achieve phosphorescence. Walter Kirn, what a hustler. But no tactician of letters has shown a greater knack for worming his way into our hearts whether we want him there or not than Adam Gopnik, the art-world observer, former Paris correspondent for The New Yorker (out of whose dispatches was spun the bestselling Paris to the Moon), and the magazine's resident tone-poet of post-9/11 Manhattan, drizzling pixie dust across a cityscape that no longer bears the hearty flavor of "smoked mozzarella," as he notoriously described the downtown death smell. It isn't that Gopnik is ungifted or imperceptive, or a slickster trickster like his colleague Malcolm Gladwell, who markets marketing. He is avidly talented and spongily absorbent, an earnest little eager beaver whose twitchy aura of neediness makes him hard to dislike until the preciosity simply becomes too much.

I like the gratuitous slap at Prose, Kirn, and Gladwell -- innocent bystanders at a drive by. Anyway, consider this some friday entertainment.

Update: Wow -- two hours after I posted what is above (possibly one hour assuming their timestamp is east coast time), Jonathan Chait published almost the exact same post over at The Plank. he used the same excerpt of the same first paragraph. He refers to a "machine gunning of innocent bystanders" in the same way that I do. Obviously since The Plank is referring to an article on the magazine's website I do not for one second assume that Chair even saw my piece, but it is eerie that the post is so identical to mine. Simultaneity is weird. Or great minds think alike. Or Chait is plagiarizing me. (That last one was a joke).