I've always loved to read criticism. Much of the criticism I've read in my life (and all of what I read in the first 30 years of my life) was read at one remove. That is, it was published somewhere (in a book, a newspaper, or a magazine) and I read it.
The critic encountered something (a play, an opera, a book, a comic book), engaged it and reacted to it, and then sat down and wrote a review of that something. Whether it was a capsule movie review in the San Francisco Chronicle Pink Pages or a novella-length essay, once the writing was done, the review went out into the world, to be picked up by readers like me.
As readers, we read it, reacted to it, pursued the something that had triggered the review (or not), and moved on. Very few readers actually responded to criticism directly. Oh, there were the occasional letters to the editor of serial publications, but even then readers had to compete with those who wished to comment on the latest Congressional antics or the chances that the 49ers would ever in a million years make it to the Super Bowl.
The critic encountered something (a play, an opera, a book, a comic book), engaged it and reacted to it, and then sat down and wrote a review of that something. Whether it was a capsule movie review in the San Francisco Chronicle Pink Pages or a novella-length essay, once the writing was done, the review went out into the world, to be picked up by readers like me.
As readers, we read it, reacted to it, pursued the something that had triggered the review (or not), and moved on. Very few readers actually responded to criticism directly. Oh, there were the occasional letters to the editor of serial publications, but even then readers had to compete with those who wished to comment on the latest Congressional antics or the chances that the 49ers would ever in a million years make it to the Super Bowl.
For the most part, criticism was a one-way process. The critic pontificated and the reader read. I don't mean this in a negative way, really. It's simply that the nature of publishing in those days meant that most published material, including cultural criticism, went one way from its author to its reader.
There are plenty of critics who write in this way (or whose past writings are preserved in this way), people I read with pleasure in print, often decades after they've written the criticism in question. From Tolstoy on Shakespeare, to Ron Rosenbaum's edgy enthusiasms, to Anne Fadiman on books, I love that kind of stuff. It's a very traditional model -- they write about their experiences, and I read it. Sometimes it pushes me to read something I never heard of, or always meant to read, or read but kind of forgot. Sometimes, I just enjoy the critical essay for itself. But when criticism comes to me in this form, I don't answer back.
In fact, criticism was a notable exception to how publishing worked in those days. It was the one place where a person could respond to something he'd experienced. The film reviewer got to talk back to those who made a film. The book critic got to say how he responded to the book. The restaurant reviewer got to report on the experience of eating a meal. It made the reviewer, the critic, the mouthpiece for an entire audience, and that's odd, since a critic can only speak for himself, for his experience with whatever it is he's reviewing.
There was a time when restaurant reviewers went out of their way to make sure that no one knew what they looked like, so they would have the same experience in a restaurant as anyone else. Getting a chance to review books for a mainstream publication meant that you were in a very small company of people who got to help determine what the public conversation about books would consist of.
We all know what happened to that, don't we?
I remember the first time I talked back to a critic. I'd been hanging around the Internet (there was as yet no web) for a few months. In a Usenet newsgroup, someone reviewed a book that I had read, and I did not recognize the book from the review. So I posted and said that. And someone else posted and said the same thing, and the reviewer posted (rather defensively, as I recall), and all of a sudden, two things happened to me.
The first was that I had to clarify, out loud, some of the distinctions I made in the last two posts in this blog. Criticism is not fact. If I disagree with your opinion of a film or a book or an opera, it doesn't mean I think you are stupid, or that I think I am better than you. It just means we experienced it differently, sufficiently so that our final assessment of the thing is different. I think I had known that all along, but I'd never had to articulate it out loud, because criticism had never had a conversational component to it before.
The second, and more profound, thing that happened was that I started to think of all criticism as part of a larger conversation. Someone wrote a book, which got published. Someone else read it and then wrote about it, and that got published, too. Then maybe I read it, or chose not to, and I talked about that with my friends who also read for fun. The original author, the critic, and my friends and I were all engaged in a conversation, even though some of that conversation was public (the published part) and some was private.
With the Internet, and especially the Web, much of that changed. Now anyone can talk back, at any time. And some critics make a point of writing in venues where their readers do talk back and engage them in conversation. For that reason, I'm at the point now where, for much of the criticism I read, one part of my response to it is deciding what, if anything, I will choose to add to the public part of the discussion.
This changes the way I engage with criticism, probably both for the good and the bad. And, although I had not realized it explicitly until this week, it changes how critics move in the world, too. More on that in the next post in this short series. For now, I want to stop with the very important observation that choosing not to respond out loud to a piece of criticism is actually quite different than not having that choice.
These days when I read without responding, it's a choice to take a more passive role. I may do it for any number of reasons (only mild interest in the topic at hand, lack of time, no real sense of connection to the experience that the critic is relaying, or dislike of the community in which the response would have to occur). However, and this is key, choosing to be passive is still a more active way of engaging any work than being a passive consumer by default.
I have a bias towards active engagement, and so I usually prefer having the option to respond, even when I choose not to exercise it. Agency is a powerful way in which to engage the world. Criticism does stretch my mind, and knowing that I can come here (or elsewhere) and respond to it forces me to be more intentional in how I choose to engage that process.
In fact, criticism was a notable exception to how publishing worked in those days. It was the one place where a person could respond to something he'd experienced. The film reviewer got to talk back to those who made a film. The book critic got to say how he responded to the book. The restaurant reviewer got to report on the experience of eating a meal. It made the reviewer, the critic, the mouthpiece for an entire audience, and that's odd, since a critic can only speak for himself, for his experience with whatever it is he's reviewing.
There was a time when restaurant reviewers went out of their way to make sure that no one knew what they looked like, so they would have the same experience in a restaurant as anyone else. Getting a chance to review books for a mainstream publication meant that you were in a very small company of people who got to help determine what the public conversation about books would consist of.
We all know what happened to that, don't we?
I remember the first time I talked back to a critic. I'd been hanging around the Internet (there was as yet no web) for a few months. In a Usenet newsgroup, someone reviewed a book that I had read, and I did not recognize the book from the review. So I posted and said that. And someone else posted and said the same thing, and the reviewer posted (rather defensively, as I recall), and all of a sudden, two things happened to me.
The first was that I had to clarify, out loud, some of the distinctions I made in the last two posts in this blog. Criticism is not fact. If I disagree with your opinion of a film or a book or an opera, it doesn't mean I think you are stupid, or that I think I am better than you. It just means we experienced it differently, sufficiently so that our final assessment of the thing is different. I think I had known that all along, but I'd never had to articulate it out loud, because criticism had never had a conversational component to it before.
The second, and more profound, thing that happened was that I started to think of all criticism as part of a larger conversation. Someone wrote a book, which got published. Someone else read it and then wrote about it, and that got published, too. Then maybe I read it, or chose not to, and I talked about that with my friends who also read for fun. The original author, the critic, and my friends and I were all engaged in a conversation, even though some of that conversation was public (the published part) and some was private.
With the Internet, and especially the Web, much of that changed. Now anyone can talk back, at any time. And some critics make a point of writing in venues where their readers do talk back and engage them in conversation. For that reason, I'm at the point now where, for much of the criticism I read, one part of my response to it is deciding what, if anything, I will choose to add to the public part of the discussion.
This changes the way I engage with criticism, probably both for the good and the bad. And, although I had not realized it explicitly until this week, it changes how critics move in the world, too. More on that in the next post in this short series. For now, I want to stop with the very important observation that choosing not to respond out loud to a piece of criticism is actually quite different than not having that choice.
These days when I read without responding, it's a choice to take a more passive role. I may do it for any number of reasons (only mild interest in the topic at hand, lack of time, no real sense of connection to the experience that the critic is relaying, or dislike of the community in which the response would have to occur). However, and this is key, choosing to be passive is still a more active way of engaging any work than being a passive consumer by default.
I have a bias towards active engagement, and so I usually prefer having the option to respond, even when I choose not to exercise it. Agency is a powerful way in which to engage the world. Criticism does stretch my mind, and knowing that I can come here (or elsewhere) and respond to it forces me to be more intentional in how I choose to engage that process.
criticism sometime makes us stronger and a challenge for us to improve our work and ourselves.
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