Sorcha's Scribblings

On Criticism -- consuming becomes conversation

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.

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.

On Criticism -- consuming what is critiqued

In among all the blog-talk about criticism lately, I was very struck by Keith Phipps' comment that "We’re not bullies and we’re not, though this sometimes gets forgotten, consumer guides. We're writers who think what we write about matters."

It is this approach that makes the best critics worth reading: the passion for film, for food, for comic books, for opera, that drives the devoted critic to stand to one side and analyze his reaction to a piece of work, the thrill or the disappointment or the odd mix of the two, and then to explain that to me, the reader. Good criticism is indeed not a consumer guide.

On Criticism -- a consumer's viewpoint

There's a lot of talk in various web locations about the nature of criticism, mostly written by people who engage in it for a living. I thought I'd take a whack at it from the point of view of someone who does a small amount of it as a hobby (see: Amazon reviews), but who most often relates to criticism as a consumer of it.

Here's a critic's take on some of the talk about criticism lately. This whole discussion has made me think about why I like to read good criticism. (Note that to my way of thinking, "good criticism" is not necessarily "criticism I agree with".) It also started me thinking about what criticism really is, and what it's not.

On the day when you were born . . .

This post over at eclectic librarian got me started thinking about music and what it's doing in my life these days.

But first, to follow Anna's lead, I went to This Day In Music and discovered that the #1 song on the pop lists the day I was born was The Chipmunk Song by the Chipmunks. *sigh*

Now, I hesitate to suggest that the worst thing about having a birthday in the last ten days of the calendar year is that the #1 song the day I was born is a greed-fest song sung by a bunch of chipmunks. (An article about the song that includes the lyrics is here.) Still, there were some very good songs on the charts in 1958, and it bums me out that this wasn't one of them.

Following a related suggestion on the This Day In Music site, I then went and looked for my "life's theme song" (the #1 song on your 18th birthday) and found it to be Tonight's the Night (gonna be alright) by Rod Stewart. Poking around on the internet looking for the lyrics, I learned that this song was never released as a single in the UK, due to the suggestive lyrics, which got it banned from radio play.

What I am most struck by when I look at the lyrics to this, my alleged "life's theme song" is how aggressively heterosexual the words are. Well, yeh, I know: DUH! It's top-40 radio and all that. Thing is, my own choices in music are a lot more eclectic. Reading these lyrics brought to my mind some other lyrics from a Judy Small song:

There are songs that say what happens
When a woman loves a man.
Or when a man loves a woman
And he does the best he can.
But where are all the songs
That tell it like it really is
When the mugs are hers and hers
When the towels say "his" and "his"?

In thinking about all this, I realized that music, like reading, is one way that I enter into other people's lives, and (I hope) learn more about them. Reading the lyrics from a song that happens to have been #1 on the pop charts on my 18th birthday, a song that I danced to many a time in high school and college, I am reminded of how little music did for me in high school. I couldn't relate to most top-40 songs and I didn't know why. About the only song I recall adoring in high school was I Will Survive by Gloria Gaynor, which was for me all about the hope that once high school was endured, there would be something better to follow.

Less than a year after I got out of high school, I discovered both my own sexual self and an entire (albeit tiny at that time) music genre where the words spoke to me. To this day, there are certain songs by Meg Christian, Holly Near, and Cris Williamson that can bring me to tears, remembering how much it meant to hear my life reflected in the words of a song.

These days, my life is more eclectic, and so are my musical tastes. I don't need a song to make me feel okay about who I am in the world, but I am more grateful than I can say that when I needed it most, an aggressively political music movement rocked my world.

Interacton in a world without real bodies

I started playing RPGs when all there was was D&D, three little saddle-stitched booklets and a handful of dice. That was around 1974. I started hanging out in online communities in 1988. I started playing computer games in 1991. Every single one of these things consumed me in some way. Combine two of them, and I could disappear for weeks on end.

I figured that something like EverQuest would eat my life completely, so I stayed away from it. My only MMORPG-like experience prior to my recent graduation from school was the Game NeverEnding, which, alas, did end. I still miss it like an amputated limb, sometimes. It was more a social experiment in community and emergence than a standard MMORPG, and it still meant a great deal to me. I have a couple friends now I met there, people whose presence in my life I value beyond words.

And now there is World of Warcraft. Come to the Hyjal server and find me as Ljanna, a level 60 druid, or Nahyomi, a level 41 paladin, or Irulani, a level 20 priest. You will even occasionally find a druid named SorchaRei on Feathermoon. It's everything I ever dreaded -- and I love playing it. Trying to find some balance, still, and expect I will do so, but if I can be in the alpha and pre-beta stages of GNE for months and years on end, I can be in WoW, too, I imagine.

In GNE, we did not have avatars -- no images of bodies for other people to look at. And while people did create deep relationships (sometimes including romance and sex, I hear), it was easy for me to remember that these were just ghosts of the real person.

In WoW, we do have avatars, we can see something that represents the other person, and we can go do things with people. I can follow you on your horse, me on my tiger, and we can go farm for faction among the Timbermaw (yeh, if you don't play, don't ask -- it's complicated). At the same time, we don't *really* have bodies -- all human males, for example, have the same standard-issue build. Different hair and facial features, maybe, but that's it.

So why do the "people" I meet in WoW seem a little more substantial than the people I met in GNE, at least initially?

How do we interact in a world in which there is the character and there is also the person behind the on-line persona? Real people can get hurt, and real people can develop real friendships. But as I wrote elsewhere, the shape of your hands and the sounds of your laughter really do matter to me in the end, because they make you feel whole in my mind -- they help ground me in your "youness", prevent me from projecting so much of myself onto my mental model of who you are, and help me stay present to you.

So how do I manage in a world where I do care, sometimes deeply, for people I will never meet? Are we back to the world my great grandparents knew, where they often sustained replationships over decades by writing letters? I wish I could ask them for pointers. I want to be a good friend to the people I will never meet, the ones who will never have bodies in my experience of them.