Books
What makes one opinion better than another? (Some opinions have been challenged more than others. Tested opinions are worth more than untested ones.) Can’t one enjoy an aesthetic experience without having to put it into words? (Absolutely, but those of us who write art criticism don’t have the luxury.)
“For an imaginative boy, the first experience of writing is like a tiger’s first taste of blood.’ — H.G. Wells, “The New Machiavelli,” 1911.
In “Train Dreams” the world of beauty and terror is balanced as only our best writers have been able to balance those things.
In locales as varied as Israel, Kenya, Massachusetts, and the country of the brain, and in rough groupings of poems about small daily epiphanies, relationships, loss and death, and the sad affairs of the world, the poems in “The Illustrated Edge” explore the meandering paths of all sorts and mixtures of feelings.
Must age diminish a great poet’s strengths? If I grant that age has such power, I’m left to ponder the truly strange fact that death does not.
A symptom of our times: two books by self-described critics that aren’t particularly critical. Informed, lucid, thoughtful, and explanatory, yes –- strongly evaluative, no
Joshua Rubenstein’s succinct account of Leon Trotsky’s life rescues the Russian radical from a remoteness, positioning him at a useful distance for contemporary readers
The brilliance of Alberto Moravia’s cool diagnostic vision — sleek, clear, cruel, and existential no matter how emotional the conflict — puts us off. His male protagonists often self-consciously analyze their puerility to the point of comic masochism.
A best-seller in France, Emmanuel Carrère’s quirky, but ultimately compelling memoir examines the effects of two disasters on very separate groups of people to whom the writer is connected, at the beginning, quite peripherally.
What drives serious writing about film? “When Movies Mattered” suggests an answer: it helps for a critic to take a side, not as consumer advocate, hipster crank, or box office predictor, but as a passionate advocate for standards, often taking on the role of separating overpraised films from the unfairly neglected.
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