The World Beyond BetterMost > The Culture Tent
In the New Yorker...
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: serious crayons on December 16, 2019, 08:51:40 pm ---But as I've told the people at the tastings, I couldn't drink gin for years because when I was a teenager that's what my parents kept in their (unlocked) liquor cabinet. :laugh:
--- End quote ---
After all the years I drank several beer-mug-size gin and tonics on Friday and Saturday nights, it's a wonder I still have a liver. Add to that, I'd go home and take two Tylenols and two Sudafeds to keep from waking up the next morning with a headache and bad sinuses (from all the smoke in the bar).
Front-Ranger:
I also really enjoyed Anthony Lane's article on gin. It more than made up for the lackluster Shouts and Murmurs.
Jeff Wrangler:
I'm way behind in my reading. Over lunch today, I read Peter Schjeldahl's article "77 Sunset Me," about himself dying of cancer (Dec. 23). Kind of funny that I read it because I almost never read his regular articles because I think art criticism and literary criticism both are pompous bullshit (or, they are for me, anyway). But sometimes I find artists and writers lives more interesting than their art or their writing. For me that was certainly the case with Schjeldahl.
serious crayons:
--- Quote from: Jeff Wrangler on December 31, 2019, 03:50:31 pm --- I almost never read his regular articles because I think art criticism and literary criticism both are pompous bullshit (or, they are for me, anyway).
--- End quote ---
As a reader and sometime practitioner of of literary criticism, I must speak in its favor. If done well, I love it. The New Yorker's book reviews are especially great; usually they are as close as I come to actually reading the book, yet I come away feeling almost familiar with its contents. Often, they're as much essay as they are book review.
Unless! Unless you're talking about academic literary criticism, like in textbooks. I don't know if they're pompous bullshit because they're utterly unreadable. My aunt was the head of the English department at the University of Georgia. Her specialty was gothic literature. I picked up one of her books once and thought, well, goth is at least a popular art and somewhat interesting, so this could be good. I could not finish the first page. I don't mean because it was boring, I mean because I literally couldn't read it.
Jeff Wrangler:
I am talking about the academic stuff, and I have more or less classified Schjeldahl and Simon Schama in that category--that is, academic. I love the book reviews in TNY. Often they strike me more as essays in their own right, especially when the writer talks about more than one book in the article. I like the "Briefly Noted" book reviews, too.
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