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Tag: criticism

Published April 26, 2018

Women and Critics: Roxane Gay and Michelle Dean

Michelle Dean talks about her new book, Sharp:The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion, and the nature of criticism with Roxane Gay for The Cut: 

I tend to judge a piece of criticism by how smart I find the argument… I don’t mean, how much I agree with it, exactly, but more: how much does this open up the subject at hand? Does it show me things about it I didn’t already know? I like debate and argument, so I’m usually all right with disagreement, and I’m even all right if the critic doesn’t come to a clear thumbs up or thumbs down. But I need the disagreement to have some kind of line I can follow on the map. I like following an interesting mind along it.

Bad criticism recites rote arguments. The shame of rote arguments isn’t just that they’re clichés, though they are, but that they tend to hide from us why a critic is actually thinking what they’re thinking. In which case there’s no point in reading the review at all. I don’t care about the bare fact that anyone liked or didn’t like a book or movie; they can only interest me in that bare fact by writing an intelligent review.

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Published July 30, 2013

Janet Malcolm: The Devil in the Detail


Gaby Wood interviews journalist Janet Malcolm for The Telegraph:

How Malcolm goes about her journalistic business is clear from her person. Her gaze is remarkably unflinching; unnervous, but not stern. She concentrates on looking at all times. She is difficult to interview, but for reasons much more prosaic than the dramatic ones I had conjured. She simply finds herself uninteresting, and so gives away little. You feel there is much more to know, and that the failure must lie in your ability to ask about it. Because when you listen back to the recording you find that she has not been especially evasive, merely – politely – private. ‘Have a macaroon,’ she says.

Malcolm’s most recent collection of essays, Forty-One False Starts, has just been published in the UK by Granta.  The US edition is available from FSG, (and is, for sake of disclosure etc., distributed in Canada by my employer Raincoast Books).

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Published February 21, 2013

Midweek Miscellany

The Importance of the Unimportant — Dwight Garner interviews Clive James for The New Republic:

I was the first person to take unserious television seriously. There were plenty of people who were writing profoundly about profound stuff. I was first to spot the importance of stuff that was unimportant: the stuff in between the shows, the link material, the sports commentators, the trivia. I started writing about that. It was illustrative, and you could be funny about it. You start describing a culture by taking that approach. That was my contribution.

Savage Satire — Samuel Carlisle considers whether American Psycho would be better without the violence, at The Believer:

Ellis… had trouble with American Psycho’s violence while writing it: the murder scenes remained unwritten until the rest of the book was completed, at which point Ellis read FBI criminology textbooks detailing actual serial killings and returned to insert the scenes that would be most unsettling to author, reader, and public alike. “I didn’t really want to write them,” he told an interviewer later, “but I knew they had to be there.”

What this leaves us with is violence that is mostly self-contained in a handful of brief chapters. To remove that violence would more or less be a clean excision, leaving the rest of the savagely insouciant satire intact.

And on a related note: The LA Times theatre critice Charles McNulty on depictions of violence on stage:

What is the line between acceptable and unacceptable violence in art? If gruesomeness is the criterion, much of Jacobean drama would have to be banned, including Shakespeare’s “King Lear,” with its graphic scene of Gloucester’s eyes being mercilessly plucked out. Some may believe they can identify pornography at a glance, but violence places keener demands on our sensibilities. Its artistic validity isn’t a function of how many liters of blood are spilled or how many limbs are dismembered. The question is one of gratuitousness. Or to put it another way: How does the brutality fit into a work’s larger vision?

And finally…

Ahab — New research suggests that Fredric Wertham misrepresented his research and falsified his results for his controversial book on the corrupting influence of comic books The Seduction of the Innocent, published in 1954:

Michael Chabon, who researched the early history of comics for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” said that while Wertham had been viewed as “this almost McCarthyite witch hunter,” he was actually “an extremely well-intentioned liberal, progressive man in many ways,” providing mental health services to minorities and the poor.

But of “Seduction of the Innocent,” Mr. Chabon said: “You read the book, it just smells wrong. It’s clear he got completely carried away with his obsession, in an almost Ahab-like way.”

(pictured above: The Phantom Lady drawn by Matt Baker was one the comics cited in Seduction of the Innocent. A reappraisal of Baker, one of the earliest African American comic book artists, has just been published by TwoMorrows Publishing.)

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Published September 18, 2012

Susan Sontag on Writers and Company

Eleanor Wachtel’s conversation with the late American writer and critic Susan Sontag, originally recorded in 2000, was recently rebroadcast by CBC Radio’s Writers and Company:

CBC Radio Writers and Company: Susan Sontag mp3

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Published August 30, 2012

Midweek Miscellany

Drowning Not Waving — A short profile of Toronto-based cartoonist Jeff Lemire, creator of Essex County and The Underwater Welder, for The Globe and Mail:

Lemire, who profited from art classes in high school but is otherwise self-taught as a graphic artist, first heard about the profession of underwater welder from a colleague at one of the restaurants where he worked before comics started paying the bills three years ago. The father of a three-year-old boy, also named Gus, Lemire felt that underwater welding seemed like a good metaphor for parenthood.

Burdened with Cinema — Clive James reviews The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael, for The Atlantic:

She could talk well about popular art because she had not only seen all the movies that there were, she would have gone to all the opera performances that there were if she had not been so burdened with tickets to the cinema. When she talked about Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly, her remarks were up there with the professional dance critic Arlene Croce’s because she, Kael, had been a connoisseur of dance all her life. She knew her way around a jazz band. Apart from mental equipment like that, her reading was prodigious in its volume, and fully serious in its content. Her house had all the Oz books in first editions—I saw them, and marveled; they looked as beautiful as her Tiffany lamps—but she was by no means restricted just to film-linked popular literature. When she reviewed a Russian movie based on a Dostoyevsky story, she could refer with daunting ease to anything by Dostoyevsky, including all the major novels chapter by chapter.

And finally…

An interview with film director David Fincher at Art of the Title:

I was eight years old and I saw a documentary on the making of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It had never occurred to me that movies didn’t take place in real time. I knew that they were fake, I knew that the people were acting, but it had never occurred to me that it could take, good God, four months to make a movie! It showed the entire company with all these rental horses and moving trailers to shoot a scene on top of a train. They would hire somebody who looked like Robert Redford to jump onto the train. It never occurred to me that there were hours between each of these shots. The actual circus of it was invisible, as it should be, but in seeing that I became obsessed with the idea of “How?” It was the ultimate magic trick.

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Published August 10, 2012

Something for the Weekend

No Idea What I’m Doing — Keith Ridgway, author most recently of Hawthorn & Child, on writing fiction:

I have no idea what I’m doing. All the decisions I appear to have made—about plots and characters and where to start and when to stop—are not decisions at all. They are compromises. A book is whittled down from hope, and when I start to cut my fingers I push it away from me to see what others make of it. And I wait in terror for the judgements of those others—judgements that seem, whether positive or negative, unjust, because they are about something that I didn’t really do. They are about something that happened to me. It’s a little like crawling from a car crash to be greeted by a panel of strangers holding up score cards.

A Dog’s Cock — The history of the exclamation mark:

no one really knows the history of the punctuation mark. The current running theory is that it comes from Latin. In Latin, the exclamation of joy was io, where the i was written above the o. And, since all their letters were written as capitals, an I with an o below it looks a lot like an exclamation point.

But it wasn’t until 1970 that the exclamation point had its own key on the keyboard. Before that, you had to type a period, and then use the backspace to go back and stick an apostrophe above it. When people dictated things to secretaries they would say “bang” to mark the exclamation point. Hence the interobang (?!) – a combination of a question (?) and an exclamation point (!). In the printing world, the exclamation point is called “a screamer, a gasper, a startler or a dog’s cock.”

One more on the late Robert Hughes at The Economist:

As our lives grow increasingly distracted and overstimulated, the critic has become both more and less relevant in the service of cultural sieve, filtering out the good from the bad. Mr Hughes didn’t subscribe to such categorical certainties. In turn he placed as much emphasis on the context of a work as he did on its content. To Mr Hughes, experiencing art wasn’t about passing a few hours in some museum, but what made those few hours meaningful to be alive.

And finally…

Larry Tye talks about his new book Superman: The High-Flying History of America’s Most Enduring Hero, on CBC Radio’s The Current:

CBC RADIO THE CURRENT: Superman: The High-Flying History of America’s Most Enduring Hero mp3

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Published August 8, 2012

Midweek Miscellany

A few remembrances of art critic Robert Hughes, author of The Shock of the New, Nothing If Not Critical and Things I Didn’t Know among others, who died earlier this week aged 74…

Maria Bustillos for The Awl:

“The Shock of the New”… brought him fame, and no wonder. It’s a marvel: a solid education in post-Impressionist modern art of the 20th century in the form of a luscious entertainment stretching over hours and hours; awareness, scholarship, wit, and a visual sensitivity matched for once by an equally sensitive sense of language, all delivered in a brisk, whip-smart, slightly clipped Anglo-Australian voice of enormous power and beauty.

Adam Gopnik for The New Yorker:

Hughes believed in modern art with something close to innocence. Although “The Shock of the New” is in many ways an account of the tragedy of modernism—the tragedy of Utopias unachieved, historical triumphs made hollow, evasions of market values that ended by serving them—that tragedy is more than set off by the triumph of modern artists.

Jonathan Jones for The Guardian:

Hughes believed in modern art, whose story he told more eloquently than anyone else ever has. He was not some stick-in-the-mud. But he compared art in the 1900s with the art of today and observed that even our best do not deserve comparison with the pioneers of modernism. This is a truth that is hard to refute. The words of Robert Hughes have cost me a lot of sleep.

I’m sure there are many more… What a loss…

See also: obituaries in The Guardian,  New York Times, and The Telegraph.

Fertilizer — The always fascinating Jeet Heer reviews Blown Covers: New Yorker Covers You Were Never Meant to See by Françoise Mouly, for the LA Review of Books:

the deeper value of Blown Covers is the insight it gives us into Mouly’s editing process. Editing is a very difficult art to write about, being by its very nature invisible, and based on thousands of tacit, unstated backstage decisions. Blown Covers shows that every idea that makes the page requires an editorial environment where new concepts are constantly being generated. Since the rejection rate is high, this can be frustrating for artists, but Mouly gets around this problem in part by allowing her artists to go all out during the brainstorming sessions, so that even if the idea doesn’t make the cover there is still the pleasure of daring to think of something new and fresh. The failed ideas are the necessary fertilizers of successful covers.

And finally…

Collective Unintelligence — James Gleick, author of The Information, on Autocorrect, for the New York Times:

In the past, we were responsible for our own typographical errors. Now Autocorrect has taken charge. This is no small matter. It is a step in our evolution — the grafting of silicon into our formerly carbon-based species, in the name of collective intelligence. Or unintelligence as the case may be.

 

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Published June 29, 2011

When Movies Mattered | The Marketplace of Ideas

Film critic Dave Kehr discusses the cinema of the 1970’s and his book When Movies Mattered: Reviews from a Transformative Decade with Colin Marshall for The Marketplace of Ideas podcast:

THE MARKET PLACE OF IDEAS: Dave Kehr When Movies Mattered mp3

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Published April 11, 2011

Louis Menand | The Big Think

In a really fascinating 28 minute interview from last year, Louis Menand — Professor of English at Harvard University, critic and author most recently of The Marketplace of Ideas — discusses books, culture, criticism, science, education (and more in between) with the Big Think:

 

(via Mark Athitakis. I can’t quite believe I didn’t see this earlier!)

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Published March 17, 2011

Alex Ross | School of Life

In this short interview, Alex Ross, music critic of The New Yorker and author of The Rest is Noise and Listen to This, discusses music and music criticism:

Thanks to the chaps at We Made This for directing me to The School Life of video series.

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Published December 13, 2010

Bring the Noise: Alex Ross Talks to Paul Morley

Paul Morley interviews fellow music critic Alex Ross, author of The Rest is Noise and Listen to This,  for The Guardian:

Morley’s post about critics, and meeting Alex Ross, is also worth reading:

I’ve always liked a critic who doesn’t think like anyone else. Someone who takes me so much by surprise with their opinions, approach and rigour that they themselves become a kind of artist. I like a critic who demonstrates that they deserve to evaluate and document the work and art of others by writing in such a way that the work makes more sense, sometimes only makes sense, because of what they write and why they write it. I loved critics, whether it was Kenneth Tynan, Susan Sontag, Tom Wolfe, Richard Meltzer, John Updike, Roland Barthes, Pauline Kael, Angela Carter or Lester Bangs, for the way they made it clear, with such evangelical poise, precision and purpose, that without the great critic, the world, and the worlds of those that made up the world, was never properly finished off.

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Published October 10, 2008

Generous Criticism

“Being generous in speaking of another’s work doesn’t mean “heaping praise”. It means delivering the critique from a place deeper than the insignificant nitpicking that comes so easily, deeper still from a place that harbors no envy, and even further down where the critique is offered in a genuine effort to improve the project, to the benefit of the discipline as a whole. Everyone wins.”

I came across Nam Henderson’s  Archinect op-ed on ‘Generous Criticism’ via Michael Surtees DesignNotes.

Design blogs, like DesignNotes, Design Observer, Ace Jet 170, Grain Edit,  and Swissmiss – to name just a few – are such an inspiration. The breadth of the design community’s interests, the generosity, willingness to share, and sheer enthusiasm for what they do is remarkable.

I wish I saw more of this kind of online dialogue about publishing.

The best lit-blogs, like ReadySteadyBlog, and Sarah Weinman’s blog, Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, rightly save their enthusiasm for writing and writers. But blogs that concern themselves with the business of books lack that kind of energy.

Although there are notable exceptions –  James Bridle’s booktwo and Shelf Awareness come to mind – the book business seems to have very little to say for itself, and even less that is positive. We hear so little  about the agents, publishers, editors, designers, publicists, sales reps and booksellers who just nail it. Instead our conversations are dominated by  hell-in-a-handcart pessimists or told-you-so digital evangelists. We link to the same gossipy controversies and angry rants. We take cheap shots and wonder why we’re being marginalized by things that are more fun.

We seem short generosity and lacking in curiosity.

Publishing is not perfect, but we do some great stuff. Of course we should be critical, but we should do it to improve what we do, not to tear it down. To go back to Nam Henderson:

“we should, as a community of professionals, be able to expect respectful commentary, considered and generous… if something is bullshit, SAY SO… If someone is skating by on laziness, call them out and challenge them – positively – to make a better effort. And challenge yourself, in every critique, to be generous: reflect on what you’re seeing in the bigger context…, identify the elements that are good, apply the logic of the good parts to the overall scheme to see where improvements can be made. Think about how much effort you would want a critic to put into a comment made to you.”

I can’t say I am without fault. I’m as snarky as the next guy. But I hope — and strive — for something better.

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