Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

Honestly my life is too fucking short to read Marina Hyde writing about the riots and Celebrity Big Brother.

How can you be sure how short is too short when it comes to these things? Medical advances, perhaps an unexpected divine intervention, may make you recant your former hurry.

stevie helpfully gave a paragraph reference, saving precious seconds

When you have an assistant editor who thinks that prison rape is a laugh, it's time to realise that life is too short to read the Guardian, full stop.

The day is full of tough decisions: choose to read Hyde but forgo discovering what Brostep is.

As though either matters, really.

I kind of liked Hyde calling Simon Cowell "the Karaoke Sauron" tbh

(1st sentence, 4th paragraph)

(Nicholas Ridley presented my a-level certificates...)

i don't read marina hyde cos i don't want to feel irritated by something i didn't want to read in the first place.

don't think the graun should be pimping this guy

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/aug/22/carlos-latuff-cartoon-arab-spring

Since visiting the West Bank in 1999, Latuff has become known for his support of the Palestinian cause; some campaigners claim his work is antisemitic. "Part of the supposed 'evidence' for my antisemitism is the fact that I've used the Star of David, which is a symbol of Judaism," he says wearily. "But check all my artworks – you'll find that the Star of David is never drawn alone. It's always part of the Israeli flag."

and occasionally, it's replaced with a swastika:

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_kAYZT4UUxIQ/SV7lXc7Ep1I/AAAAAAAAG98/IxwjWrhEBMw/s400/Israeli+raid+in+Gaza+2.jpg

article omits the fact that latuff was the runner up in iran's 2006 cartoon holocaust mockery competition

http://artintifada.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/holocaust_remembrance_day_by_latuff21.jpg

Nice.

His cartoons are as crass as the ones we rightly lampoon on Batshit Rightwing Cartoons 2011

the disparity between ilx opinion of marina hyde and...basically everywhere else i frequent, is really astonishing. i think i fundamentally don't trust anyone who dislikes what she does, i'd unhesitatingly call her my favourite newspaper writer around at the moment.

She's so unfunny.

aren't you a london media person, though

she's one of the few people anywhere that i would describe as legit funny

ilx is like an anti litmus test for humour though

xxp far too arch as well, it's like she writes with permanently raised eyebrow, which is NAGL.

"i've found the difference in opinions people express about kobe bryant between people whose salaries are paid by the los angeles lakers and .. everywhere else is striking"

I think she's great when she gets indignant and really skewers a deserving target. Less so when it's just generic sarcasm about Katie Price, but her non-LIS comment writing has been excellent.

by "everywhere else" i did not just mean "the london media"

is she normally this bad a writer?

Of course, while Friedman's seasteads might be in vogue with Valley types or those dreaming of the Tea Party Venice, among the good burghers of what convention already demands we style as riot-scarred England, I fear his laissez-faire ideals would garner short shrift or sarcastic invitations along the lines of: if people wish to live in places unconstrained by the rule of law, perhaps they'd care to try Tottenham.

I think she's great when she gets indignant and really skewers a deserving target

Yeah I'd go with this, and the same is true for Alexis Petridis but most of the time I find both borderline unreadable in much the same way. Any actual insight is crowded out by the apprent need to clunkily shoehorn 14 gags into the same sentence. Really cluttered writing.

she did it with piers morgan

would love to know what caek considers good writing, but as ever when it comes to journalism and ilx, i feel that "good writing" isn't a concept that would be recognised here at all

that sentence caek quotes is terrible lex

xp glad you know different, thanks for that.

i have no idea if that problem is systemic to her work: she doesn't write about stuff i'm interested in, so i don't read her articles. i just opened up her last column to see what the fuss is about.

but come on. i'm not saying everynoe should write with orwell-like clarity and a copy of strunk & white at their side, but that sentence is just utterly awful.

it's the only one i ever read by her, so not fair to judge on just that

'the good burghers of' is always a red flag phrase, and google say marina's used it 16 times in the guardian alone

She doesn't seem to have any ear for prose rhythm or turn-of-phrase, both of which are pretty important when you're trying to do comedy (or "comedy"). If you read most of her sentences outloud, would they really make people laugh, or would they just lose the thread midway through?

tbf i blame the sub for not striking out "the good burghers" -- it was a long-dead faux-comic cliche about the time "mine host" started to grate

giles coren to thread

tbf, i think comic writing in newspapers is spectacularly difficult to do consistently well because of the whole premise of writing "about" the news as it happens.

but a lot of the writers who try make it harder for themselves by taking the approach matt is complaining about, which is to include as many jokes (i.e. stylistic cliches) as possible.

Of course, while Friedman's seasteads might be in vogue with Valley types or those dreaming of the Tea Party Venice, among the good burghers of what convention already demands we style as riot-scarred England, I fear his laissez-faire ideals would garner short shrift or sarcastic invitations along the lines of: if people wish to live in places unconstrained by the rule of law, perhaps they'd care to try Tottenham.

she's perfectly suited to private-eye style logistical beatdowns so i don't understand why she's mainly doing LIS these days. i loved her guardian diaries, when she did them.

Yeah it seems to be a problem that afflicts a lot of comic broadsheet writers. You really notice it when the style leaks over to TV, like when you turn on one of those ropey Friday night C4 shows and there's someone reading one of those torturously long sentences off an autocue in a voice that suggests they were never meant to be on TV in the first place.

the disparity between ilx opinion of marina hyde and...basically everywhere else i frequent, is really astonishing

― lex pretend, Wednesday, 24 August 2011 13:27 (26 minutes ago)

this is pretty hilariously purblind

i have repped for her on ilx in the past, i'd guess between 38% and 55% of the smallish coterie of ilx users who have expressed an opinion on her ish have been at least somewhat enthusiastic

xp This is why I don't read many "comic" novels, because they're prone to looking very busy and strained in order to give the emphatic impression that something funny is going on, when something a little calmer would be much more amusing. It's in the same ballpark as the I'm-being-funny-now contortions of James Wood's "hysterical realism". Like Matt says, none of it can be successfully read out loud.

aagh on deadline so no time to find more examples but these are two of my fav m hyde columns

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/apr/22/sky-leaders-debate-spin-room-abortion-democracy
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/apr/26/david-cameron-world-of-euphemisms

what does "the good burghers of" mean? is that some kind of meat wagon pun?

ilx tends to think some pretty unfunny shit counts as great comedy (see: comedy threads passim)

do you think marina hyde does great comedy?

Enrique (Enrique) wrote this on thread What did I ever see in Zoe Williams? on board I Love Everything on Feb 3, 2004
Marina Hyde I like. She does the Diary quite often, which is the only bit of the Groanydad worth reading ('cept for Swells, obviously). Hey Toby, fuck Varsity, right? Right.

:0

"what convention already demands we style as riot-scarred England" is a joky revolt against a cliche which immediately goes on to help itself to the effective content of that cliche: are we supposed to be worried about riots or not? marina will happily mock us either way! the anxious-compulsive need for a style-vectored gag almost completely undermines the (actually quite strong) point she's making

i think marginalising ILX and the rest of the world into "us" and "them" is what created this mess in the first place

It seems I was the first to rep for MH on ILx, linking to this piece, which is still quite funny: http://www.guardian.co.uk/diary/story/0,3604,1135757,00.html

xp Those two examples prove that the more substance MH has to work with the better she is. She comes unstuck when she doesn't have enough to say and fills the space with these tortuously overextended sentences, one of which mark s has just elegantly dissected.