Bill Marx
Why does Laura Miller feel, given her belief that negative reviews are often useless, that she has to kick criticism while it is down? Why argue against the efforts of a small number of delusional reviewers in major publications who continue to speak fruitless negativity to the indifferent masses?
“New York Times” Book Critic Dwight Garner makes salient points about the need for incisive criticism, claiming that too much happy talk denies common sense and undercuts credibility. But the ‘gonzo’ masterwork “Fire the Bastards!” hammers the point home much more memorably.
Helen Constantine’s new translation of Balzac’s “The Wild Ass’s Skin” serves this wonderful and weird book well. It is one of the great, black comic fables in world literature, a dazzlingly demented exploration of a society’s lack of imagination.
There are plenty of amusing moments when dramatist Charles Busch makes effective use of his gift for exaggerated wit and whimsy — no dramatist can drop the word ‘canasta’ with as much hilarious finesse.
Shakespeare’s “Coriolanus” deals with the difficultly of recognizing superiority at a time of radical social breakdown, specifically when it is democracy that is in extremis.
Discard the empty rhetoric about “amplifying the arts,” follow the money and you will eventually find, winding your way through all the obfuscation and spin, WGBH’s thrifty corporate character.
Based on Public Editor Arthur S. Brisbane’s recent New York Times column on arts criticism, he and others at the newspaper haven’t much of a clue regarding what a serious arts review is supposed to be.
Northrop Frye, inspired by the poet William Blake, demands that the critic be a warrior in a “mental fight,” articulating the liberating value of literature as a source of imaginative energy that generates possibilities.
WGBH is not even attempting to make any excuses, not bothering to put in the energy to explain why the station isn’t using funding from its supporters to hire first-class journalists or to create news programming that builds community and educates because it challenges, investigates, and digs deeper.
Theater Commentary/Review: A Not So Dumb “Month in The Country”
Given the Russian writer’s modernist pedigree, should director/playwright Richard Nelson and translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky be punished for putting some “unevenesses” into their staging of Turgenev’s finest play, “A Month in the Country”? I think not.
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