Category Archives: Other Critics

Orwell’s diaries

Posted on by under Authors, Other Critics, Reviews

One usually doesn’t think of George Orwell as somebody with a Romantic inner life; this is mainly because of how we’re taught to read him in high school and college, as the cold-eyed, despondent observer of the mid-twentieth century’s horrors.  And he is that.  But he was also a human being (hence given to sentiments and wanderings and frustration and hunger, like the rest of us), one equipped with an artist’s tools for expressing his humanity, and we get a good look at all this in the new omnibus edition of his Diaries, which has just come out in England and which D.J. Taylor reviews in the latest Times Literary Supplement.  Taylor considers these a major part of Orwell’s oeuvre and important matter for any new biographers, writing that they are

Handsomely produced, illustrated with Orwell’s own pencil sketches and footnoted with [Peter] Davison’s customary élan, this latest wave in the repackager’s tide invites two questions. Why did Orwell write diaries? And what do they tell us about him? . . .

Well, for starters,

there is [many] a sudden glimpse of all kinds of things not often associated with Orwell – frustrated yearnings, sequestered retreats, the deepest of romantic chasms.

Long live Eric Blair, in all his versions.  Happy MLK Day!

-TGR

T.S. Eliot’s Letters (from The London Review of Books)

Posted on by under Book Recommendations, Other Critics, Reviews

Michael Wood, a professor at Princeton, has published a thorough but relatively brief review of the second volume of Eliot’s letters, which Faber & Faber just released.  Sigh, that means it’s expensive (Thirty-five pounds!  Pounds, not dollars!)  I’ll probably never actually read the book, since like everyone else I’ve got a thousand other things I want/need to get through.  However, the review offers an entertaining gloss on the volume, and if you’re the kind of reader who is interested in writers’ letters, you’ll like it.

Wood is particularly sapient–and grimly funny–when discussing the poet’s generally wretched marriage (“the competitive invalidism the Eliots have instead of a marriage”) and his grey-faced attitude toward life: “this is the writing of a man who thinks he has a vocation for unhappiness, who thinks unhappiness is a genuine vocation.”  That looks sanctimonious out of context, but Wood is actually a charitable reviewer who obviously likes Eliot.  Can’t blame him: while the life may have been miserable, the poems remain magnificent.

-TGR

Solid film crit in The New Yorker (as usual)

Posted on by under Other Critics, Visual

I’m not sure which New Yorker film critic it’s fashionable to dislike now, but David Denby has a remarkably good column in the January 4 issue, where he reviews two films you may have heard about, Avatar and the latest Sherlock Holmes (the former has been getting good press at McDonald’s).  Denby is always a capable critic, but this piece caught me for some reason.

Reflecting on Avatar, Denby quickly and humanely underscores its annoying aspects–the corny idealization of aboriginal culture, the irony of a quarter-billion-dollar techno-thriller being about the evils of technology–then calmly celebrates the galvanic, sensuous accomplishment of the production, the way it does what blockbusters are supposed to do: entertain lots of different people a lot for a couple hours.  He slips in some Deleuze–“this world is as much a vertical experience as a horizontal one, and the many parts of it cohere and flow together.  The movie is a blissful fantasy of a completely organic life”–and tempers his philosophical reservations with unashamed popcorn joy:

Well, actually, life among the Na’vi [the spear-wielding, blue good guys], for all its physical glories, looks a little dull.  True, there’s no reality TV or fast food, but there’s no tennis or Raymond Chandler or Ella Fitzgerald, either.  But let’s not dwell on the sentimentality of Cameron’s notion of aboriginal life–the movie is striking enough to make it irrelevant . . . The movie’s story may be a little trite, and the big battle at the end goes on forever, but what a show Cameron puts on!

Coming to the “hyperbolic” Holmes, Denby is at his sharpest when demonstrating how the visual characteristics of a film inform its narrative quality (or lack of that):

[Guy] Ritchie’s visual style, aided by the cinematographer Philippe Rousselot, is graphic-novel Victoriana [!]: there are steampunk interiors–iron-works and infernal machines with a retro-futuristic look–and dim laboratories in which everything looks rank.  The movie is grimly overproduced and exhausting, an irritating, preposterous, but fitfully enjoyable work, in which every element has been inflated.

And he’s absolutely correct about another thing: Robert Downey, Jr. is probably the most charming weasel of an actor since Bogart.  He makes any crap worth watching.  Remember Iron Man?  The Soloist?  Ally McBeal?

-TGR

Sports, sports, sports

Posted on by under Other Critics, sports

On Deadspin, the great sportswriter Charles Pierce (a man equally comfortable with Flann O’Brien and the Celtics) takes on The Sports Guy.  This is a critical piece, but CP shows some love, old-guy-to-younger-gun style.  A limpid, funny explanation of the charms and larger flaws of Bill Simmons’ writing.  Pierce is especially good on Simmons’ penchant for lame, sweeping pop-culture observation.

In related news, Pierce now has a very cool blog on Boston.com.  Note the quote from At Swim-Two-Birds at the top of the page.  Go read it, go bookmark it, keep reading.

-TGR

Crack is Whack

Posted on by under Other Critics

From The New York Observer a couple months back, an interview with/portrait of “The Last Crack Hipster.” Apparently crack was popular with the LES art scene and its hangers-on earlier in the 2000s.  Kind of makes sense: from what I’ve heard, it does get you real, real high.  And it’s edgy and all that, something new for educated white kids to steal.  Anyway, this piece is wonderfully written: the pop-docu-literary style, off-the-cuff but fully grammatical, works very well for the subject, and the writer, Spencer Morgan, does an excellent job of criticizing crack use (easy) without sounding like a self-righteous ass (not so easy).  Reminds me a bit of vintage Tom Wolfe or Hunter Thompson.  Done right, the New Journalism style (an inadequate word, but whatever) still gets it done, son.

-TGR

It’s a Wonderful Life

Posted on by under Other Critics

TGR is a gigantic, sentimental sucker for this movie.  It only took my Dad about 10 years to get me to enjoy it.  What’s not to like, this time of year, when even the deepest cynic is prone to feel a little magic?  The masterful Everyman, Jimmy Stewart, the delectable Donna Reed (although she’s too skinny for TGR’s tastes), and Lionel Barrymore as one of the best villains of the ’40s.  Nothing wrong with some belief in human goodness.

That said, Bedford Falls doesn’t seem like a fun place to live.  Hence I give you this Christmas present, an essay I read every year to keep my mushiness in check: “All hail Pottersville!”, by Salon.com’s Gary Kamiya.

To all my reading friends, may you have a wonderful, safe holiday.  See you ’round the way.

-TGR

The Pervert’s Grand Tour (of England)

Posted on by under Other Critics

Slate has started running a hilarious, erudite travelogue cum (and I mean cum) history of sex clubs, sex societies, sex orders, treehouses, fraternities, and assorted other carnal associations in 18th-century England.  Written by the historian Tony Perrottet, each installment takes 5 minutes to read–10 if you are sluggish like me–but will lighten all 24 hours of your day.  And your keyboard will remain dry.

-TGR

The U.K. is killing its universities, too!

Posted on by under guides and nudges, Other Critics

We know the script by now.  The putrefaction of the humanities.  The attempt to turn public institutions into for-profit adjuncts of the defense and telecom industries, overseen by wealthy philistines with the complexions of raw potatoes (Google “Mark Yudof”).  Increasing tuition matched by bigger, shoddier, haphazard lecture-hall “classes” where only the preternaturally determined learn anything.  From the symposium to the balance sheet.  The metastasis of bureaucracy, the general, mentally enfeebled, administrative top-heavyness.  And a public that, for the most part, just does not give a fuck.  I mean, what have universities ever done for civilization?

Anyway, the United Kingdom is accelerating its murder of education, albeit in a somewhat warmer fiduciary environment than California’s.  This article from the Times Literary Supplement explains the terrifying rise of Research Assessment Exercises, which are furthering the decay of humanities departments in British universities.  Yudof and his toadies need to step up their game: their fragmented, inarticulate, shambling, dark-of-wood-paneled-boardroom approach to destruction is simply less impressive, from a total strategic viewpoint, than the depraved efficiency of their Anglo counterparts.

-TGR