So, I probably could have found a picture of the actual beach at the Jersey Shore to illustrate this plug for y’all go to read my meditations over at The Atlantic on how Jersey Shore fits into the long literary and artistic tradition of the beach as a site of humiliation and bad decisions.  As the piece begins:

When he gave his youngest daughter permission to go to Brighton, England, Pride and Prejudice’s Mr. Bennet declared that Lydia would never be happy “until she has exposed herself in some public place or other, and we can never expect her to do it with so little expense or inconvenience to her family as under the present circumstances.”  But he could have just as easily been talking about the members of Jersey Shore, the MTV reality show about a summer share house that, with its first season just ended, seems on the verge of becoming a mass cultural phenomenon.

Check it out.  But I (corny, I know), chose the bridge for another reason.  In the next month or so, I’ll be starting a column for a new section of The Atlantic‘s website, writing pieces much like this one.  It may mean I have to cut down on the frequency with which I post here a little bit, but the blog is definitely not going away.  You all are too valuable an audience for me to test my ideas on and to talk things over with for me to let y’all go.  I don’t say it often enough, but thank you for reading, for talking back, for emailing.  You make me a better writer and thinker.

I thought this tidbit in Corey Killgannon’s profile of Frank Serpico was pretty great:

After several frustrating attempts at collaboration with co-writers — “They just don’t get it,” he said — Mr. Serpico enrolled in a weekly workshop through an arts group in Troy, N.Y., where his classmates also do not always understand his stories. “How could they?” he said. “We have women in the class writing about their kids — they don’t know what a bag man is.”

Frank Serpico writes out the story of his life daily in longhand, at the cabin, then types the pages on a computer at the public library, using the two-finger method he honed filing arrest reports on station house typewriters, gathering the pages in a manila folder. The memoir begins on the night of the Williamsburg drug bust, his bleeding body cradled by an elderly tenant who called for assistance when his fellow officers did not, the narrator floating above and recounting the life path that led him there.

Writing groups, and writing classes, are funny things.  Some of my best classes in college were on writing, but I can see how that might not be a precisely universal experience.  Mark Salzman’s beginning of True Notebooks is all about how awful his experiences teaching adult-education writing classes were (one of his students called another student’s mother a bitch after the student read a story about how her mother slapped her father after discovering his adultery), though he ends up loving teaching in prison.  I can only imagine what it must be like for Serpico to get critiqued by the housewives–and for them to get feedback from him.  Do you think he tries to get them to write about corruption in nursery school admissions processes?  Or gets them to blow the whistle on their co-op boards or something?

A.O. Scott’s point about the ratings system and its absurdities is extremely well-taken.  His piece in the Times this weekend concluded:

In 2154, when “Avatar” takes place, it is possible that tobacco use will no longer exist. But if movies are still around, there will still be arguments about what they should be showing, and to whom. Such arguments are built into the medium and our complicated bond with it. We want movies to acknowledge what is real, but also to improve on reality, to give us a vision of a perfect world in which everything is permissible — a world that’s sexy, dangerous, scary and smoky and safe for children too.

I basically don’t think the ratings system should exist.  The guidelines have become so absurdly arbitrary that newspapers routinely run capsule reviews oriented at parents that interpret those ratings.  One of those reviews played a critical role in my being allowed to see Romeo + Juliet in 1996.  Parents who care about what their children see are doing additional research anyway.  Parents who don’t will take their kids to pretty much anything: it bothered me to see the toddlers somebody took to see The Lovely Bones at a screening I attended, but they weren’t even borderline, their escort just could not have cared less what the movie was rated.  If they’re not being used or still useful as a guide to content, they’re just an exhibit hall for hypocrisy and inconsistency, and should be retired.

I love Entertainment Weekly, which I think is probably not something pop culture critics say very often.  It’s not a Very Serious Journal, though it employes a number of very good critics, particularly for movies.  It’s solidly poppy magazine, funny and irreverent.  Michael Ausiello is one of the entertainment journalists I most admire: he’s both very good at reporting on television, and has built a great, multi-platform relationship with his fans, and his an extremely unique voice.  One of the reasons I subscribe to the magazine is a desire to contribute to his salary.

But I am mystified by the extent to which the magazine is in the tank for Twilight.  One of the reasons EW’s stayed viable is by staying hard on top of emerging trends.  But the oversaturation for Twilight is kind of astonishing.  The publication of a graphic novel version of the novels is news.  But it’s not a six-page spread.