Archived entries for criticism
Unfortunate Adwords
Google should consider suspending its automated Adwords service during times when the media is covering mass tragedies. Here’s a screenshot from a Chicago Trib story on the Newtown shootings that I just opened.
Maybe someone at the Trib noticed it, since reloading the page brings up a cellphone ad.
Yard With Orange Orb
Shooting with Fuji Velvia 50 slide film and the Leica M3. Raw scan (no Photoshop tweaking). Larger sizes at Flickr.
(Kids, this is where Instagram came from. You know, when photography still had a soul.)
Anyone who receives this bill…
ANYONE WHO RECEIVES THIS BILL WILL BE BLESSED WITH ALOT OF MONEY BUT ONLY IF YOU COPY THIS MESSAGE ON TEN OTHER BILLS
Breaking All the Rules
Sometimes attributed to John Cage, but actually written by Sister Corita Kent, the 10 Rules are pretty much universal to student/teacher relationships.
[via Brain Pickings]
John Updike on the Ethics and Poetics of Criticism
Open to (healthy) debate, John Updike’s six rules for criticism have something to offer to web commentary. From his 1977 anthology of prose, Picked-Up Pieces:
- Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.
- Give him enough direct quotation–at least one extended passage–of the book’s prose so the review’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.
- Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.
- Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending. (How astounded and indignant was I, when innocent, to find reviewers blabbing, and with the sublime inaccuracy of drunken lords reporting on a peasants’ revolt, all the turns of my suspenseful and surpriseful narrative! Most ironically, the only readers who approach a book as the author intends, unpolluted by pre-knowledge of the plot, are the detested reviewers themselves. And then, years later, the blessed fool who picks the volume at random from a library shelf.)
- If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author’s ouevre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it’s his and not yours?
To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser. Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like. Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in an idealogical battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never (John Aldridge, Norman Podhoretz) try to put the author ‘in his place,’ making him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.
[via Brain Pickings]