Nigel Beale quotes Helen Gardner:
“Critics are wise to leave alone those works which they feel a crusading itch to attack and writers whose reputations they feel a call to deflate. Only too often it is not the writer who suffers ultimately but the critic…”
Beale asks: “Which is great and poetic and all, however, is silence [...]
Entries from May 2009
May 31, 2009
More words of advice for the writer of a negative review
May 29, 2009
Life: New Yorker edition
“… to emigrate is to become a foreigner in two places at once.”
—”Briefly Noted”, the New Yorker, 1 June 2009
May 25, 2009
Architects of Fear: Conspiracy Theories and Paranoia in American Politics — George Johnson
Umberto Eco’s novel Foucault’s Pendulum is both more fun to read and more informative than George Johnson’s Architects of Fear: Conspiracy Theories and Paranoia in American Politics, which promises an in-depth explanation of conspiracy theories and theorists but doesn’t really deliver.
Johnson’s central claim is that conspiracy theorists see sinister links between a variety of unrelated [...]
May 23, 2009
Dune and its laughable honor code relative to Beowulf and Fast & Furious
In her book Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents,* Elaine Showalter quotes a letter that Kingsley Amis wrote as a student regarding the Old English requirement at Oxford: “The warriors and broken-down retainers who strut bawling across its pages repel by their childish fits of self-glorification and self-pity. The cheapest contemporary novel has [...]
May 23, 2009
Robin Hanson on Spent
Those of you who’ve read the comments section on Spent might’ve noticed two by Robin Hanson. He also also posted about Spent’s main arguments and what he sees as the gold and schlock of them on Overcoming Bias. If the book or the ideas intrigue you, both are highly recommended.
May 21, 2009
The view from the Tucson afternoon
Outside my window:
After weeks of hundred-plus days, rain signifies that one can go outside without roasting or feeling caught between sun and pavement. In Seattle, rain was the default and sun a rare treat. Tucson is the opposite; now I marvel gratefully at the rain, thinking that we often want a change from whatever we [...]
May 20, 2009
Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior — Geoffrey Miller
Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior is worth reading, but only with a skeptical eye that will keep you from passively imbibe ideas like, “In a complex, media-rich society, perhaps only people with very good mental health can tolerate a high degree of openness without losing their equilibrium” (emphasis added). I suspect many if not [...]
May 17, 2009
Dune — Frank Herbert
Unlike, say, Ray Bradbury and or Dan Simmons’ novels, the Dune series is probably best appreciated before one’s literary taste has better developed. It still offers some treats like a plot that moves worlds, which begins with a deadly test that, even if we know Paul Muad’dib will pass, still offers immediate tension reminiscent of [...]
May 14, 2009
On marketing, movies, and Geoffrey Miller’s Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior and more
In “Why are so many movies awful?“, I quoted the fascinating New Yorker story “The Cobra: Inside a movie marketer’s playbook,” which says:
One of the oldest jokes in the business is that when a studio head takes over he’s given three envelopes, the first of which contains the advice “Fire the head of marketing.” Nowadays, [...]
May 13, 2009
May links: Alain de Botton, Keyboards, Taste, and “there are only so many Americans smart enough to enjoy [The Economist’s] articles.”
* Put me in the “he’s brilliant” category regarding Alain de Botton. Expect more on him shortly.
* Check out the money quote regarding one of my favorite magazines, The Economist:
The Economist is like that exotic coffee that comes from beans that have been eaten and shat out undigested by an Indonesian civet cat, and Time [...]
