I feel like an ass making my first comment here a correction, but I'll console myself with the fact that you asked. Tales of the City was serialized, at least the first few novels were, in the San Francisco Chronicle. My sense is that this fact worked against its literary reputation at first because it was considered low brow to appear in a newspaper. This could be the exception that proves the rule, as I can't come up with another example. Love everything you have published here. Thank you.
Nooo it's PERFECT for the first comment to be a correction! :) Especially when I've asked, but also, it just thematically hits the tone for "criticism is good".
I will amend the footnote to say I was wrong and see comments. I'm delighted.
Killer! The position of the critic feels washed out in some places at the minute, so this is a refreshing read. Been thinking a lot about the cry to 'let people enjoy things', particularly in relation to Rowling when the thing itself is not very good regardless of how we understand her. If everyone is playing the game of 'I'm baby' (I signal my vulnerabilities as a way to protect myself from reasonable critique rather than bring nuance and humanity to my work) then who's flying the plane (resisting context collapse). The point in this piece where I felt real resistance was the use of train rather than railway station - take that as you will.
Thank you so much for this comment -- I loved it. When I read it I was like "aaaah hooray someone gets it!!!" I only decided I should finish this essay because I felt like there was this gap in the present discussion, with nobody defending critics and criticism in strong terms.
You're 1000% right that weve got too much i'm baby and almost nobody is flying the plane.
Apologies for saying train station I grew up in too many different countries.
I was terribly disappointed by Leopoldstadt, precisely because everyone had praised the great master taking on his own past, and the most alluringly grim topic at that, and no critic bothered to point out amid all this fluffery that this is a wildly boring play. A crude dramatic irony: the Jews of Vienna are well integrated, and are sure they will not come to be cast out! An overcrowded and undercharacterised cast, who never have time to do more than relay the author's own apercus and set piece history lessons! The structure is just that we check in with a family in their apartment every few years, and things get a bit worse - where is formal innovation comparable to Shoah or Son of Saul or Zone of Interest, or nearly all of Stoppard's previous work? Only the final act, once the cast had been scythed back, and the basic irony of their ignorance of the coming doom is finally resolved, has fresh humanity. Stoppard truly is a master, but this was old hat. I don't even really mean this as a criticism of him - there's no shame in being defeated by this topic, of all topics. The shame attaches to those who didn't want to say he had lost his final battle, so instead they reviewed and gave awards to his biography.
You know what I think I was helped in some way by Leopoldstadt being my first introduction to Stoppard outside of R&G are dead. I agree that it contains no formal innovation at all, and I thought that was interesting on some level since I know he's most known for that and seems to have moved away from it, but I thought this was also emotional without being sentimental which is pretty hard to do especially in this area. Definitely agreed the third act is by far the strongest part.
This was fascinating, and puts me in mind that my only objection to "criticism" is when it's shallow: "I don't like it" or "I don't get it." I grew up around way too many folks whose objection to modern art was that it was, basically, something they didn't like. But they could never articulate why.
Later, as I started to be exposed to art outside of their influence, I began to have my own reactions, and only occasionally could I not say what it was that did or didn't speak to me. Weirdly, a *lot* of this was stuff like a print of Dali's Corpus Hypercubus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crucifixion_(Corpus_Hypercubus)) that hung in their church. But mostly it was music. And since I can honestly say that it was my parents' taste in music they would tolerate being played on the radio (this being the early '70s in eastern New Mexico -- so very remote), it was always weird to me the ways they would react when something I adored came on. But the weird part was they never seemed to understand, or even be willing to take the time to understand why they did or didn't like something, and that was when I realized that true criticism required thinking, analyzing, and confronting the subject in ways that made it an exercise in itself worth doing well. It didn't hurt that Messrs Siskel and Ebert were doing their thing on public TV and that despite its remove from other places, the college in town was exposing me to more than they ever imagined.
Regrettably, I read so little paid criticism these days because the flood that is social media is overwhelming even my consumption of the things I like!
I feel like an ass making my first comment here a correction, but I'll console myself with the fact that you asked. Tales of the City was serialized, at least the first few novels were, in the San Francisco Chronicle. My sense is that this fact worked against its literary reputation at first because it was considered low brow to appear in a newspaper. This could be the exception that proves the rule, as I can't come up with another example. Love everything you have published here. Thank you.
Nooo it's PERFECT for the first comment to be a correction! :) Especially when I've asked, but also, it just thematically hits the tone for "criticism is good".
I will amend the footnote to say I was wrong and see comments. I'm delighted.
Killer! The position of the critic feels washed out in some places at the minute, so this is a refreshing read. Been thinking a lot about the cry to 'let people enjoy things', particularly in relation to Rowling when the thing itself is not very good regardless of how we understand her. If everyone is playing the game of 'I'm baby' (I signal my vulnerabilities as a way to protect myself from reasonable critique rather than bring nuance and humanity to my work) then who's flying the plane (resisting context collapse). The point in this piece where I felt real resistance was the use of train rather than railway station - take that as you will.
Thank you so much for this comment -- I loved it. When I read it I was like "aaaah hooray someone gets it!!!" I only decided I should finish this essay because I felt like there was this gap in the present discussion, with nobody defending critics and criticism in strong terms.
You're 1000% right that weve got too much i'm baby and almost nobody is flying the plane.
Apologies for saying train station I grew up in too many different countries.
I was terribly disappointed by Leopoldstadt, precisely because everyone had praised the great master taking on his own past, and the most alluringly grim topic at that, and no critic bothered to point out amid all this fluffery that this is a wildly boring play. A crude dramatic irony: the Jews of Vienna are well integrated, and are sure they will not come to be cast out! An overcrowded and undercharacterised cast, who never have time to do more than relay the author's own apercus and set piece history lessons! The structure is just that we check in with a family in their apartment every few years, and things get a bit worse - where is formal innovation comparable to Shoah or Son of Saul or Zone of Interest, or nearly all of Stoppard's previous work? Only the final act, once the cast had been scythed back, and the basic irony of their ignorance of the coming doom is finally resolved, has fresh humanity. Stoppard truly is a master, but this was old hat. I don't even really mean this as a criticism of him - there's no shame in being defeated by this topic, of all topics. The shame attaches to those who didn't want to say he had lost his final battle, so instead they reviewed and gave awards to his biography.
You know what I think I was helped in some way by Leopoldstadt being my first introduction to Stoppard outside of R&G are dead. I agree that it contains no formal innovation at all, and I thought that was interesting on some level since I know he's most known for that and seems to have moved away from it, but I thought this was also emotional without being sentimental which is pretty hard to do especially in this area. Definitely agreed the third act is by far the strongest part.
This was fascinating, and puts me in mind that my only objection to "criticism" is when it's shallow: "I don't like it" or "I don't get it." I grew up around way too many folks whose objection to modern art was that it was, basically, something they didn't like. But they could never articulate why.
Later, as I started to be exposed to art outside of their influence, I began to have my own reactions, and only occasionally could I not say what it was that did or didn't speak to me. Weirdly, a *lot* of this was stuff like a print of Dali's Corpus Hypercubus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crucifixion_(Corpus_Hypercubus)) that hung in their church. But mostly it was music. And since I can honestly say that it was my parents' taste in music they would tolerate being played on the radio (this being the early '70s in eastern New Mexico -- so very remote), it was always weird to me the ways they would react when something I adored came on. But the weird part was they never seemed to understand, or even be willing to take the time to understand why they did or didn't like something, and that was when I realized that true criticism required thinking, analyzing, and confronting the subject in ways that made it an exercise in itself worth doing well. It didn't hurt that Messrs Siskel and Ebert were doing their thing on public TV and that despite its remove from other places, the college in town was exposing me to more than they ever imagined.
Regrettably, I read so little paid criticism these days because the flood that is social media is overwhelming even my consumption of the things I like!