Harvard Book Store; WGBH Forum Network; Daniel Mendelsohn and Charles McGrath on Criticizing Creativity

Okay, thank you, and welcome to the Cambridge Forum. Tonight we're discussing criticizing creativity with Daniel Mendelssohn and Charles McGrath. Welcome to the Cambridge Forum, Daniel and Chip, and why don't you discuss it. Why don't we start by stipulating a couple of things? One is that I think we're here in part because there's this presumed tension between the notion of criticism and creativity. We think of creativity as the creative, originating act, and criticism as a secondary act. And maybe we'll get into that later, but let's start in the beginning and say that of course criticism is creative in the sense that it's writing. All writing is at some level creative if you ask me. Writing, at least good writing is hard and involves both thought and imagination.

And at a certain level, I kind of believe all texts are involved many of the same problems. So let's put that aside. And then the second thing is let's, in this may answer some of the issues that were asked. Let's start maybe by trying to make a distinction between reviewing and criticism. Does that make any sense to you? Yes, I think there is. And I think it's not just because critics, I'm about to become a music critic. It's an add a new branch to my work. Yes, and I think actually a sort of interesting way to start pursuing the question of the difference between reviewing and criticism is to figure out whether it's a question of as it were quality or quantity, is it a piece of criticism if it's 4,000 words in the

New York review of books and just a review if it's 400 words on somebody's blog or a short piece in the times? You know, I would say that to my mind a review, to some extent, is both more immediate in its timing and its more commercial in its aims, maybe, it's an evaluation of a product that has just appeared for the benefit of an audience who is trying to decide whether or how to consume that product. So I think that's part of it. I don't think, I guess what I'm trying to say, I don't think that reviewing is just a sort of lesser or inferior version of criticism, but I think that reviewing might have different aims, actually, I think it's a different animal.

I mean, people who read the New York Times, you know, when you and I were doing lots of stuff together at the times, and they hear about, oh, you know, ex-great book has just come out. Well, then they're going to read the Sunday Times and they want to know, well, what is this really? And is it something I need to pay attention? And that, I think, there's a sort of a service-oriented aspect of reviewing, whereas criticism, as the name suggests, is sort of an act of dissection that aims to understand, in some large sense, what a work of film, theater, whatever the object in question may be. And that is just for the benefit of anyone who is interested in plunging that deeply into the nature, the aims, the construction of a given work. So I think they actually do think they have different aims, to some extent.

Yeah, I think they have different aims, and I also even think they have different forms and maybe even at some level, different souls. I think your first point is not, which you may have meant jokingly, which is, you know, it's a criticism, if it's long, and it's a review of it's short, there's some truth to that. I think reviewing is what is the kind of criticism that most of us are exposed to, almost all the time, and reviewing it, I think you're right, it's almost a consumer guide kind of thing. We read book reviews, we read movie reviews, we read music reviews, TV reviews, and we do that basically, and we expect the review to answer two questions. What is this, and is it any good?

And I think that a valuable thing is way up front. What I think of this criticism does something a little different, and I can think of great critics with whom I seldom agreed, and yet whom I read with great interest, Pauline Kale, being a good example. I mean, at least half the time I thought Pauline was off the wall, and yet I wouldn't miss a Pauline Kale piece. On the other hand, a movie reviewer for a paper, a book reviewer for a paper who was consistently that off the mark in my judgment, I think I would cease to pay attention to. Another thing going on, I think, is that we're living in a culture now where there are fewer reviews and fewer good reviews than there used to be, or so we think.

I'm not so sure that's true. When I took over at the Times Book Review in 96, one of the things I had to do was quickly put together an anthology of a hundred years of the Times Book Review, and that meant going back and God helped me reading a hundred years of the Times Book Review, and picking the high points. There weren't many. It's kind of amazing how wrong-headed the New York Times was over a hundred years, and how most, I think, most reviewing that's done on the spur of the moment, done either in newspapers or in weekly magazines or whatever, for this kind of consumer function. It's interesting to me how wrong-headed it is and how it does not pass the test of time.

I would argue that criticism, as we're talking about, might stand up better. But I think that to give the reviewers a their due, and I've done both, as you know better than anybody, reviewers, because they have to work fast, have to come up with an impression and a theory of the text or the film or whatever, pretty quickly. If you have to make decisions pretty quickly about quality in a work, hopefully a work of art, you can be wrong. One of the reasons I love writing for the New York Review of Books is that you can have 12 months to think something over before you write your piece of criticism about it. They're not interested in being timely, they're interested in being right maybe, and a daily

paper or a weekly magazine doesn't have that leisure. When you're reading the New Yorkers, say, to take a weekly example and a book is newly published, the editors of the New Yorker owe it to the readers of the New Yorker to produce a piece that evaluates that in a timely fashion, whereas the New York Review of Books, as I always like to joke, is just getting around to reviewing Moby Dick, but it'll be a great book, and it will be right. As the beneficiary of that system, but it's also somebody who has worked, apart from what I did for you at the book review, I was the weekly critic at the New York magazine for a few years, and then you just have to be on top of things, and quite often we're wrong. I think that's interesting, so I think that I don't, I guess I want to not underestimate

the context of reviewing, and not to be little reviewing, because reviewing is essentially a service-oriented activity, and you have to be timely, and as we know better than anyone, when you have to produce copy by 11 o'clock on Monday morning, you hope you're going to be right, but if you had six more months to think about it, you would almost certainly come up with a different set of things to say about the same, whatever it is, book, film, play. I don't want to belittle reviewing, I wish that it were done better across the board. I wish that the people that reviewed our books were better, and I wish that with exceptions, and I wish that the people that reviewed our movies were better, with exceptions. One of the things that troubles me about reviewing right now is that the increasingly we seem to be in a thumbs-up or thumbs-down mentality, that's as all we expect of our reviews, and

that puts tremendous pressure on the review. Also, it also puts, I think, undue weight on the review itself, one of the problems that we, I think we face now as a culture is that a very few institutions, chief among them probably, the New York Times, can make or break a work of art. They can make or break a book, they can make or break a play, they can make, it can make or break a movie. You could argue that that's always been true because of the times as authority, and because of its reputation quite fairly earned for hiring good people and writing to the highest journalistic standards. On the other hand, as fewer and fewer other places do that, as fewer and fewer other papers

have book reviews at all, variety last week fired, it's drama critic, and it's movie critic, variety. They're going to rely on freelancers, I guess. But it seems to me that what we're seeing is kind of a shriveling up of the outlets where one used to get news about books, about plays, about movies, and increasingly, it comes down to just a very few venues which perhaps have been granted more weight than they deserve. Right, although there's sort of 800 pound gorilla in the conversation is that there are in fact more venues for news about books, movies, theater, and everything else now than there ever have been in the history of the planet because of the internet.

What seems to me to have happened is that the, and this is something you and I like to talk about, so this will be fun. But the, let's say, official institutional vehicles for expressing opinions or delivering news about new cultural production are shrinking, and the reason they're shrinking is that there is a giant technological revolution taking place, and that what is replacing those venues are the private expressions of opinions and deliveries of news about cultural production which is the blogosphere, and not just blogs, but also smaller online publications that actually have a certain kind of efficiency and mobility that the old behemoths maybe didn't.

The question that remains is what is the precisely because of the essentially private quality of 89% of this new criticism, let's call it, for the time being, how there aren't in place the checks and balances and standards and editorial procedures that we are used to because we come from the world of the dinosaurs. And so, I mean, this was originally my problem with the sort of blog reviews or blogging for which I've caught a lot of punishment online when I first sort of questioned this, but you know, it just seemed incredible to me that a person could essentially write a review of something and not be edited, you know, it just seemed extraordinary that you could say anything about anything, and there were no fact checkers, there was nobody like you to tell a person, you know, you chip to tell a person like me, Daniel, well, do you really

think it's fair to say that and aren't you going overboard and blah, blah, blah, you know, that it was just this sort of unchecked effusion, and to my mind, you know, the problem is that the tone devolves very quickly, I find, when there aren't those kinds of checks, and I'm not saying that's always the case, and as we both know, there are excellent blogger reviewers and lit blogs and movie blogs, and that's, you know, so I don't want to get into that because then we won't get anywhere, but I just do think that when you have a fact checker and you have an editor, the, you stray more seldom into what I see as a kind of snarky, ad hominem vicious tone that I often detect in these essentially new private expressions of opinions about culture, not always the case, but you could never say in the New York Times the kinds of things that you can say sitting in front of your laptop,

and that worries me because it fits into this thing that you were just talking about, about the thumbs up, thumbs down, and also the thing I was just talking about, which is you need to take time to think about something before you produce a useful opinion about it, and, you know, the instantaneity of so much personal computer writing, you know, online expression, I think it's a problem when what you're aiming for is either reviewing or criticism. Your first impression, your angry response to somebody, all of that, we can't do because we have to wait for the printing presses to be filled with ink and the editor to get back with the comments and all of that, and I think that's a benefit in terms of criticism, you know. I tend to agree, the, you know, the people in the blogosphere and there are a lot of them who have been tickle, especially I'm speaking specifically now about the literary blogs, which are the ones I pay the most attention to. A lot of them tickled to see the newspaper reviewing go down because they feel empowered and they feel, in fact, it's precisely their

freedom from these institutional constraints that makes them valuable. I mean, these are people that for whatever reason, you know, either feel that they couldn't have, couldn't have, or didn't have the patience or whatever, the connections to become a reviewer for the New York Times to hook up with the Atlantic or the New Yorker. And here, all of a sudden, now they, now they have a pulpit, and they don't have to tow the institutional line and they don't, and they don't have to, and they don't have to buy into the biases real or imagined. And there's some, there may be some truth to that. The other thing you were talking about was interest to me is the business of snarkiness. Snark is, I think, the lingua franca of the blogosphere. Though I have

detected, it seems to me, just recently, signs that the blogosphere is growing up. I think there's less snark than there used to be, and there's even a growing civility, which frankly can't come a moment too soon. I, you know, a lot of what used to pass for critical discourse on the internet of the blogosphere was just vitriolic and irresponsible. And yet I do, I do detect, I think, the sense that it's growing up. On the other hand, you could argue that some of it, not all of it, is a little bit like a breath of fresh air. It's conversational, and they'll say things that you can't say. Or that you're not supposed to say. Yeah. Well, I mean, look, I don't,

I don't think these things are mutually exclusive. I mean, I think that's also a sort of a stance that has corrupted useful discussion of the difference between traditional criticism and the new criticism, so to speak, which is it's not that they're mutually exclusive. It's not an either or battle to the death. And as you say, you know, this sort of more personal expressionistic approach to reviewing and discussing, reviewing and all of this, obviously does provide a sort of a balance to more traditional and in certain ways, more feathered kinds of expression about culture. I just find it, I do find that the, I mean, I sort of got into this sort of fray at a point where this snark level was so high and I just couldn't go on talking to some of these people because I couldn't believe just the way that they were talking. It wasn't, you know, and I say that as somebody who

has gone many rounds with people in the backpages of the New York reviewer books. I'm not afraid of the, you know, fisticuffs, but there are rules, you know, and I think that the ad hominum rule is one that a lot of these people don't understand, you know, that you can talk about people's work and you cannot talk about people. But I don't think they're mutually exclusive and it certainly has whatever else the case may be about the current state of criticism. This has, the advent of this new kind of criticism has certainly sparked an amazing amount of discussion by all kinds of people about what criticism is and what purposes it, what purposes it serves. So that can't be bad. It can't be bad, but you know what is bad? I have a very specific complaint about the blogosphere and it'll sound selfish and venal, but I think it has larger repercussions. It doesn't pay. It's assumed that the work you do on the blogosphere is for free. And to me, that's as someone who makes this living writing, the notion that you

don't get paid for free writing is troubling. But there's a larger issue here, which is, I'm concerned about a notion, a place, a kind of critical discourse that's carried on only by people who are rich enough or crazy enough to work for nothing. And the, and it's also when there are no financial strings attached, that's also when it seems to me some of the things that you're talking about, like fact-checking, like editing, like responsible reporting. I think they also disappear very quickly. And you get what's replacing that kind of traditional marketplace where work was rewarded in some financial level for its merit. Now the new marketplace is the marketplace of hits.

A piece on the internet is valuable precisely and only in terms of how many people go to it. Right. Right. It's a kind of new economy of criticism. And it obviously, well, it has to be because, and I think it's exactly the inverse of the old economy, because if what matters is not dollars per word, which people like us care about, but hits per piece, then you're going to write the kinds of pieces that are going to get the most attention. And getting attention, as we know, is not necessarily concentric with saying judicious, intelligent, considered things. One would almost say quite the opposite. Right. That the more outrageous and crazy you are, the more people will go to see what it is that you said. And so I think the new economy, not necessarily, but in some ways almost inevitably encourages a kind of production, which is about entertainment, rather than criticism, which is, you know, as I always like to point out.

And as you know, as a classicist, as well as I do, the word criticism comes from the Greek word to judge. So a faculty of judiciousness is at least at some point in the history of the world was thought to in here in what criticism should be. And if what you're trying to get is the most people to look at you, then judiciousness is not necessarily a part of it. As we know, there, I mean, one can develop a reputation for being a wonderful judicious writer, and that will attract attention. But I don't think it's going to be attracting as much attention as saying really nasty things about the New York Times, which everybody loves to do. And that's going to get a lot more hits than the I love the New York Times judiciousness blog. Absolutely. That's true. So I think it's a problem. I do think it's a problem. I would also want to address another aspect, a chip of the thing that you were just talking about, the professionalism, and not so much about money. But the fact that I think that what I do when someone pays me to write a piece of criticism or a review of what I do.

It's a part of a given thing. It's qualitatively different because I am being paid by an institution to produce a certain kind of object. It's a public endeavor because the institutions for which I work are publications that is connected to an institution. And that is necessarily different from, I think, if I were to say the same thing on my blog, it would have a different aspect and a different quality. And a different quality and a different character than if I said the same thing in the New York Review books. And I think, you know, I've been, we've been talking for many years now about all these issues. But I think another aspect of the difference between the new criticism and the old institutional criticism is precisely that I'm not just saying what I think of a movie avatars. If I write something for Bob Silver's at the New York Review of Books, I'm saying something to the people who are reading the New York Review of Books. It's a public function. I'm not just sitting there expressing myself. And I think that's somehow different. I haven't sort of exactly worked out why it's different.

It's very interesting. How much of it I wonder has to do with how you imagine your audience. So, for example, do you write differently? And I would suggest that you do a little bit when you write for the New York Review than when you write for the New Yorker. And, you know, I used to notice this at the book review and also when I was at the New Yorker, there's a downside to this, which is that I would sometimes ask somebody to write something for me at the New Yorker, write something at the New York Times. And this would have been someone whose work I admired elsewhere. And then the writer would have an attack of what I call New Yorker writers or timesitis. All of a sudden, the writer wouldn't sound like himself anymore. The writer would sound like some awful constricted pale imitation of what he or she imagined the New Yorker or the New York Times ought to sound like. But to go back to it.

So, you're writing in a public sphere for an institution with standards and for an audience that you have in the back of your mind. Well, I don't think so much about the audience in terms of sort of pitching a notion to an audience, but I'm aware that I'm writing for people, not I'm not writing for me, although of course I enjoy working on the pieces that I'm working on. I'm doing, I'm performing a service for an audience of people who, and we are engaged in a kind of public exchange because they have the right to write back and talk about what I wrote. So, I just feel, as I say, it's a notion I've been trying to work out, but I think that if I wrote the same words, but I were just typing on my laptop and going to post it on Facebook, I think the whole activity, the quality of the activity would be entirely different.

And my awareness that I'm engaged in a public discourse affects the way I put things, not in the sense that I'm going to use bigger words for the readers of the New York Review of Books than I used for the readers of New York Magazine, but in the sense that there's a kind of, it's a civil, civic, and civil exercise. I'm talking in public about things that are important to the public because it's part of our public culture, and there is a way to talk about things. It's not just me sitting in my underwear, you know, at three in the morning being pissed off because I didn't like such a movie, which I think is different, and that may be old fashioned, but I don't care. There's also, it seems to me, a difference possibly between these public and largely print forms and the internet in terms of expansiveness.

The other troubling thing about the internet, it seems to me, is that things get reduced to screen grab or less, and now we're down to Twitter, God help us. And that also, it seems to me, is a way in which our culture is drifting, and these other forms give us a chance to be more expansive, to be more nuanced. Although the interesting flip side of that, is that sometimes when you read these sort of personal postings, what's extraordinary, you really appreciate editors, because of course the flip side is that people write 60,000 words about Avatar, and by the third paragraph you're in a coma. There's also that, you know, it's either the danger of the sort of the Twitter mentality, which is to say nothing about something in no words, or just not, you know, being totally out of control.

Anyway, it's, again, it's always hard to discuss these things and not come off as this sort of foggy, but to a certain extent I guess I am, just in the sense that I think that professional criticism is an honorable profession, and I think it is an old one, and an important one in the civic, you know, in the life of the polity potentially. You know, we need critical thinking, and being, you know, critical about the arts is just an extension of a faculty which one hopes the citizenry at large will be practicing. You know, that's why criticism is a public, that's why I think of it as a public activity.

You made a couple of minutes ago, Daniel, a distinction where you implied a distinction between criticism at its highest level, and we still need to talk about what really good criticism is, and entertainment. And I want to be a little stubborn here, and maybe this is just me, I think if we're going to talk about criticism, the bottom line, the number one thing I expect from criticism, even hybrid criticism, is that it be entertaining? Right, and by that I mean pleasurable, and that's maybe a way in which we can get around to what is criticism creative, and to what degree is it art? And it seems to me all art is pleasurable, it needs to be pleasurable, but I believe before it can be anything else, it has to be pleasurable, it has to engage and entertain.

And in fact, one of the things that troubles me about a lot of academic criticism, and maybe this is maybe a road we shouldn't go down, but now that it's there we can at least look at it, is that it's not pleasurable, it's not entertaining, it is not meant to engage you. I mean a lot of academic criticism, frankly, seems to me to be designed to keep the layman out. Everything about it is saying, you can't read this, you don't know the language, you're not smart enough, and you're not dull enough. Right, but you could, I mean just to, I mean I share your opinion as you know, but you could say well, but it's entertaining to other academics, maybe. You know, it's serving the purpose of criticism, because other people who are in that club and speak that lingo, find it great.

Do they really? Well, I, you know, it may be the Emperor's new clothes, but I don't know, I mean, because I don't understand it, so I can comment on it. You know, I spent three months in a course on dairy dye ones, and I had to lie down with a cold compress. But I think, I mean, I think, you know, to a certain extent, we can quibble over what we mean by entertaining, but of course a great essay is going to be entertaining in the sense that all good writing is one would think induces pleasure in a person who's able to appreciate it. When I was criticizing the desire to entertain before and the, you know, in this branch of criticism which worries about hits, you know, my worry is that it's like the news, right? Most news is boring in the sense that if you think about complicated world events, most people are going to tune out, and so that's why the TV news is so idiotic, because it wants to be entertaining in that sense. So I think in a sort of corrupted way, you know, you can only tell the story, you know, of the war in Afghanistan through the human interest story of a little, you know, whatever.

And that devolves into a kind of parody of entertainment. But of course, all good writing is entertaining in the sense that, you know, any, you know, aesthetic product that's well made entertains or gives us pleasure. So sure, I mean Edmund Wilson is an entertain, you know, entertaining writing writer, even though he's not saying outrageous things just to get attention. But it seems just, okay, he was my editor, so I always listen to him. It seems to me you said the key words, good writing. And to me, when I was an editor in the position of hiring critics or assigning critics, to me that was the bottom line. I mean, before I cared about anything else about you as a critic, your credentials, your, and I mean, actually, I mean you personally, you know, what appealed to me was that you could write.

And that seems self evident, it seems obvious, but it's not. I mean, good writing to me is good thinking. And good writing is writing that expresses that thinking in a way that's clear and entertaining. It's not a commodity that's there for the picking all over the place. And I think in some ways, it's something that some of our critics have neglected in their rush to get on to something else. But that's what I mean when I talk about thinking about your audience. You know, I'm always aware that I'm writing four people and that I can't lose them, I can't board them, although I'm sure I often do.

You know, a sense, I mean, since, for example, to take an example, there was a time, as you know, very well, when I was the go-to guy, if there was anything classics related in the popular culture, like 300 or Troy or a new translation of Greek tragedy, that the times would call me or the times magazine would call me or the New Yorker or Mr. Classics. Mr. 1-800-classics. So I, and I would, to a certain extent, that's when more, because I was trained as a scholar, you know, I'm more aware than ever of the fact that I've an audience and things that are obvious to me about this very specialized discipline are not obvious to most people. And that then you have to be considerate. That's a good word to keep in mind when thinking about criticism. You have to be considerate of who your audience is and of their needs. They need to have things explained to them. I don't say that in a condescending way. I don't understand things about astrophysics. And probably there were better writers who were also astrophysicists. I would understand a lot more about astrophysics, but people who are generally interested in astrophysics probably aren't great writers for all I know.

You see what I mean? So I think that there is this quality of, you know, to say, oh, such a so-and-so as a good writer and so on. It's thinking about who you're writing for. I mean, I could write about Euripides, for example, you know, for 69,000 pages. And I would be very happy, but no one else would be, because they just want to know what the play is about and why they should see it and how is the performance. Well, I think that's what makes good writing. I think good writing also has to do with service, serving your audience. And also making connections. I mean, I think the reason that people went to you so often and dialed 1-800 Mr. Classics was because that what once may have seemed like an interesting stick.

Okay, here we get a Classics Professor at PhD to review 800 or to review Brad Pitt and Troy. It turns out that every time you did it, it ceased to be a stick. You did for me and for a lot of people, you reminded us of this classic tradition that perhaps some of us that only paid lip service to you pointed out how it was still vital, how it was still apropos, and you made connections. Which, that's my next point, it seems to me about what a critic ought to do. And maybe that's one of the differences, if we want to arrive at it, between a review and criticism. Is it criticism does something more? Maybe it makes connections, it brings in other contexts. Is that too far?

Well, I think that's something criticism can do. I mean, I think whenever I think of criticism as opposed to reviewing, I think of criticism as a full autopsy of a, there's this object on the table and you're going to take it apart and figure out how it works and how all the pieces go together. And you don't have that leisure when you're just writing review and you don't, that's not necessarily your purpose, as we said. So I don't know. I want to go to, although I would love to keep talking about what a good critic I am, I would really like to go to this question of creativity and criticism, which we were talking a little bit about on the train coming up and then we decide we couldn't talk about it because we would use up all our good ideas and not have any left for this evening. But I think that, you know, and you had brought up some interesting points about the sort of the recent history of criticism and these debates about whether criticism is creative.

And I think the word creative is so vex that it should just go off the table because we tend to romanticize the act of creation, you know, in this essentially 19th century way, you know, and that we privilege creativity. But nothing is really creative in the sense that it arrives in the world ex nihilo, you know, I mean, everything is parasitic on something, even novels, even symphonies, you know, nothing is totally new. And I think criticism looks worse, so to speak, because it's obviously parasitic on another object. But I just think creativity is the problematic word, really. But there was a moment we were talking about this on the train coming up, there was a moment in the 80s when, when a bunch of very distinguished literary critics in my mind, many of them associated with what was then thought of as the Yale School of Criticism. It got impatient with the notion that they were practicing a secondary art, that a work of criticism was not as, well, if we can't say creative, not as valuable, not as special, as the novel or a poem, and so on.

And because these were very distinguished and brilliant critics, they said, no, criticism is in art. It stands just as high in the in the firmament, and they pointed to people like Walter Pader and people like that said, look at that, that's, we read that as art. And so, okay, and then the curious thing was then having done that, having enabled or empowered criticism and sort of promoted it up the pantheon, what they produced was God awful. It was just, you know, it was this stuff, it was very heavily influenced by the French, by Derrida and by Bart, and as I recall, it was, it was every sentence had parentheses within parentheses, it was all this, this kind of punning discourse.

And unless I'm mistaken, not surprisingly, that movement died out. You don't hear Jeffrey Hartman or Harold Bloom anymore claiming, though they're still very great literary critics, you don't hear them kind of claiming now that their critical art, their critical practice, is on the same level. So, that raises the question, well, were they wrong, or did they just go about it the wrong way? Well, I mean, to my mind, what's interesting about this, and I say this, you know, not only as a critic, but as a person who writes nonfiction, or what they call narrative, nonfiction, or creative, nonfiction, or, you know, is that the privileging of, say, fiction, let's leave criticism aside, as opposed to nonfiction, that it's more inspired and harder and more wonderful to write a novel than to write a document.

So, I mean, this is a documentary text, say, is a prejudice that's so deeply ingrained, and I have to, I mean, you know, it's ridiculous for me to be saying this, because of course I'm pleading my own cause to a certain extent, but it seems to me that it is no more noble inspired or difficult to write a novel than it is to write a good piece of war journalism. So, one refers to an object in the real world, a real object in the real world, ostensibly, and the other is invented out of the imagination. I think this idea of imagination, you know, we have a lot of romantic 19th century allegiance, too.

And, you know, I was very gratified when a book of mine was published in France, where they'd make, and everyone kept saying, oh, you know, I loved your homo, and, you know, having taken high school in French, I thought, a homo meant a novel. And, they basically refer to anything, you know, as a homo, that's a sort of a piece of writing, you know, that has some kind of aspiration to be interesting, which I think is a much, I think the fiction nonfiction parasitic, non parasitic divides our misleading false and essentially increasingly useless, you know, I would say. You know, it's not the most interesting thing that you could say about a book is whether it's true or invented the story in the book. I think a more salient and interesting distinction for starters is, is it interestingly written? You know, I'd rather read an interestingly written account of the war in Iraq than a trivial cliched novel, and the former is better writing anyway.

I just think we have to leave behind these kinds of distinctions, which I think are increasingly sort of odios in some way. I tend to agree, but I'm not sure I can go all the way, because one thing that strikes me is curious, and it's been a shift, kind of culturally a shift, certainly in publishing, in the last 15 or 20 years. Why is it that given two accounts, let's say two accounts of a childhood, two accounts of an upbringing? We now automatically give credence to the one that is true, and we give credence certainly when we go to the bookstore. I mean, and this is, I guess what I'm talking about is the way that memoir has to a very considerable extent, you surpped the novel.

And I'm curious, why is that? Just because it's true, and yet it turns out, of course, a lot of them aren't true. And then when they're not true and when they're exposed as false, the memoir says, well, I'm getting at the emotional truth. Well, that's what the novelist was getting at. Well, but I mean, that, you know, as you know, is that I think has a lot to do with something not within the genres themselves, but a sort of a large cultural shift or a problem or a crisis about what reality actually is. I mean, it seems like a nutty thing to say, but in the world where reality is essentially private, then who's to say that the novel is more valid than the memoir? And that's always the sort of the defense, the self-defense of the phony memoirist.

Well, it was my truth. I may not have survived the Holocaust by running with a group of wolves in Central Europe, but that felt true to me. You know, and in the AIDS of psychoanalysis, psychoanalysis, you get, you're on shaky ground questioning, you know, because we're told that people have their own emotional truths and all that. But, you know, so it opens up a huge can of worms which we're not going to be able to eat because I see Sasha standing up and we're going to start our audience participation. And she's a psychiatrist, so it's a good thing we didn't know that. Sure, I'm about to be correct. Well, I do have to ask, but we've drawn to a close. And so, first of all, Chip, I was going to ask you, when you say writing is a good writing leads to pleasure or pleasurable feeling, wouldn't you expand it to just saying if there's depth of feeling and thought that's good writing as opposed to pleasure? Depth of feeling and thought, I guess, I think it's maybe my bias.

I think really good writing at some level is playful. I think that there's an element of wit, there's an element of surprise, there's humor. And so I think it's perhaps all those things, but I always want to lean a little bit on the pleasure principle. I think that is what we look for in any art, first of all, we want to be transported a little bit. And that's not to say that you can't be transported by ideas. You can be immensely entertained by reading Daniel Mendelssohn's piece this week in the New York Review about Avatar. It's funny, it's surprising, it's insightful. To my mind, in the best sense of the world, it's entertaining.

But in part, I suspect it's because of what Daniel said earlier that he writes with some sense that he's writing for someone else. He's writing for an audience, or he's at least writing within this form. He's not writing just to get some things off his chest. Right, I would say, it's funny, as you mentioned that, I thought, but you wouldn't ever feel the impulse to be funny. If you were just writing for yourself, you know what I mean? That would be weird, I think. Well, you would know better, Sasha, because you're a psychoanalyst, but I just think if I sat there sort of going, and I knew no one is ever going to read it, then I would be worried about myself. I guess this is for both of you. You mentioned in your essay on Angels in America that when it came out in 93, I think it was, that AIDS was a lethal or fatal illness. And then when the movie was made by Mike Nichols, because it was no longer a fatal illness,

it had a different feel to it. Even though the content, although he changed the second half, it had a lot of the same content. Chip, with your book where you have the oops sections, you're trying to predict what will be long lasting over centuries. I got the impression, right? I wasn't trying to predict. I was trying to say how badly the times got things wrong. And that's a little different from what happened to Angels, which is what happens to lots of works of art, I think, is that over time they evolved. No, the thing about the oops section was just, it was to point out the unreliability of the SNAP judgments that we do ask people to make. And it would be much easier if you had asked the person who reviewed catcher in the eye, if you asked him to write it a year later, he might have more nearly got it right.

I mean, it's hard to get these things right, especially when a work of art is new or unusual or difficult. But also, I mean, I think, you know, I want to keep emphasizing what I think that, you know, when we were engaging criticism, you're always talking about a moving target. And Angel, I mean, you're talking about Angels in this point that I made in that review of the TV movie version of Angels in America which came out in 2004 or five, that our thinking about AIDS and the nature of AIDS itself in certain demographics, to be sure, had shifted radically from 1993 to 2005, which gave one a different sense of this play about AIDS. But, you know, here as a classicist, I want to say, you know, to what extent does it matter? Because the work is the work and it has to work wherever the context is. I could say about Euripides Trojan women that it was written as some, you know, many people believe as a response to a certain atrocity that was committed during the course of the Peloponnesian War.

A thing that most people who see the Trojan women neither know and perhaps should not care about as audiences sitting in a theater who are going to be affected by this parade of suffering women. They will have a different experience. The suffering will mean something different. But if it's a good play, I would say, it's still going to work. It's going to work for different reasons with different people. But, you know, so it is a moving target. We don't know what people are going to think of angels in America or catcher in the right in the year 4,010. And that's great, I think. I was going to ask if there are elemental things that you look for when you write literary criticism or criticism. And that would be, if it were literary criticism, you'd look at the actual words. You'd look at the construction of the words and the sentence. You'd look at the color and richness of the sentence. And you'd go meticulously layered.

So again, that would address that it doesn't matter whether it's about an illness that's lethal or not. It's how it's put together. Yeah, it seems to me that the first job of a critic, maybe, I'll take back what I said, maybe even before being entertaining, the first job is a kind of repertoire honesty. It seems to me that critic has got to describe the work of art in a way that is honest and to what it is. And takes the work of art on its own terms. And it seems to me that you start from there. This is what this is. This is a play about whatever. This is a novel about it is written in such and such a way. This movie is filmed in such a way. The actors are these people who do this. And then you can go on from there.

It seems to me there is this kind of repertoire side to it. Yes. I mean, I think that's certainly true. And I'm always appalled when I'm reading reviews where people fail to do the necessary thing, which is say this is a memoir of abuse. Or they start talking about the trees before they tell you you're in a forest. And so, yes, there has to be a certain, again, this is about serving your audience. You have to sort of describe the object. But again, I would never approach something with a set of rules about things I want to talk about or this should I talk about the language. Because every work is different. There are works with beautiful language we were talking about one on the train. That is unbearable to read, you know, a novel by John Banville called The Sea, which has very beautiful, lyrical language.

And I want to throw it out the window after four pages, because there's only so much beauty you could take. And, you know, so there are things like that. Then there are somebody, and I know people probably stone me for saying this. But, you know, there are great novelists who are not great writers. George Elliott, I think it's not a great writer. And it drives a worse writer. Yeah, so I think that if you're right, so let's say I were reviewing a book by one of those people. And then I'm not going to get hung up on the beauty of the language question, because that's not what's important in that work. You see what I mean? So I never, you can't approach everything with the sort of cookie cutter, because there are certain, and then there are lyrically beautiful novels of language, where it is like the English patients say, which I argue about people with. Some people love it, some people don't. But that's where the language is sort of part of what's going on in a larger sense in the novel. So I never tried to impose this sort of list of rules about what to talk about, because everything is different.

There are things. Look, Avatar, which I liked a lot better than Chip did. You know, it's clunky. The dialogue is absurd. The story is hackneyed, blah, blah, blah. But that, to me, is not the most important thing to say, because I think there is more wonderful and interesting considerations. I mean, I would say it, but that's not all you want to talk about. So that's what I mean when I say I'm moving target, both chronologically, but also qualitatively, every work is different, and you have to, I would say, the only rule that I try to have is you have to do justice to the work that's in front of you. And that's important. So as a critic for both of you or a reviewer and critic, if you looked at a macolic biography versus Philip Roth, you would both have the skill to address both books. I would hope. I mean, you could also argue that if, when I was at the New York Times, I would probably not assign the same person to review a macolic biography

and a Philip Roth novel. I would probably well Mendelssohn could do both, but more likely you'd get someone that was versed in historical biography to do the one and get someone who knew something about fiction, ideally somebody who knew something about Roth to do the other. Okay. Again, this is about the AIDS epidemic, but it's the movie Philadelphia, you know. Yeah, I'm going to let you ask questions out, finish, I'm sorry. I just have to ask one more about Philadelphia. There's one scene where Tom Hanks is dancing with his IV pole to an opera, and he's very ill. He knows he's going to die. And that scene will stay with me till I die, I think. I'll never forget it. But certainly it's a flawed movie. It ends happy, happy in a way. He dies, but he dies in a bed. He's warm. His mom is Joanne Woodward. She kisses him goodbye.

His lover gets to kiss him goodbye. They show films of him being happy after he's dead. I mean, videos from his childhood. And so I guess if I were reviewing it, I would find a lot of flaw with the movie, and yet there was a transcendent moment in that movie. And so, okay, go ahead, say something. But everything is flawed. I mean, the criterion is not flawlessness, because then we would have very little to read or watch. I just think that's, again, you have to look at the, it's like having children, right? This is what you're dealing with. You could say you want him to be blonde or the darker or whatever, but that's what you've got, and that's what you've got to deal with, and that's fine. Okay. Go ahead, I'm sorry. Move up closer please, so you can be heard. First off, thank you both for coming. We were talking about works of art as being moving targets,

things that are a little difficult to pin down, and being a critic and classist to boot. I'm curious which you think of the wildy and idea of the critics' role as the person who validates a piece for everyone else, and if you can perhaps fix the vertigo of a moving piece. Well, you know, in a way being a classist makes it hard for me to respond to that, although wild, was a classist, as we know, because what validates a work of art is, I mean, whatever that means, you know, is there are a lot more factors, and time is one of them, and mass, reception is another one. So I don't like to think that a critic is the person

who validates the work of art. You'd like to think that a critic can be in a position to draw attention? Yes, I would. Yeah, but that a critic could draw attention to a work of art that is deserving of attention, or that... Or even just someone who perhaps give it meaning to someone who doesn't know what to make of it? Yes, I do think, I mean, that I think is my job. That, I think, is my job to look at something, and to say, well, I think this is about, this is how it works, and isn't that interesting. I mean, it's a lot like teaching, you know, this is, let's take this Faberier Agapart, and show you how it all works, and isn't that interesting. And I think, you know, it doesn't happen often, I think, in one's career, that you get to sort of deal with something that has been neglected or misunderstood, and to lay it open, and then people pay attention to it. You know, but that's certainly a possible stance.

Yeah, I was going to say, I mean, every so often it does happen that a critic comes along who maybe because of timing or because of special affinity for an author does help validate or put that author on the map. I mean, Richard Elman did that for Joyce. Clint Brooks did that for Faulkner. I was just going to say, Gore Vidal did that for Don Powell. Though the process may have begun before, and Vidal, we were talking about Vidal coming up on the train. He did that for a couple of people. So that happens, and it's great. I mean, to me, that may be one of the most valuable functions that a critic can perform, but you can't ordain it. You can't order it up. It seems to me it happens. Thank you. To follow up on that a little bit, because we're talking.

Come right up. Can the creator of the piece actually, have I want to say this, create the critics, so to speak, does the can, the quality of the work or the reputation of the author or the artist or the playwright or the translator would have actually elevate the criticism? That's really an interesting question. I kind of want to say yes, because it's, I mean, you would like to think that, and I think if we thought hard enough, we could find evidence for it. Great art creates an audience for itself, I think, often, and it may create a kind of critical discourse. It also raised an interesting question,

which is something that Daniel and I touched on as we were walking from our hotel over to here, which is, you know, there are critics who have befriended the people that they wrote about. Harold Rosenberg, the great art critic, was pals with all the painters that he wrote about. And he really saw his job as kind of furthering their thing. And there are critics who make it a point to kind of interview the people that they write about. I actually have a little, a certain trouble with that. It's partly coming from a newspaper tradition of impartiality and disinterestedness. But I think in a perfect world, a critic ought not to be too close to the creator.

It's close as he wants to the work of art. But again, going back to the point of about moving targets, I mean, in a certain point, it doesn't matter what the... It doesn't matter what Tony Kushner thinks angels is about. It matters what we think it's about. It matters what it means when we watch it. Right. I would say, I mean, just to return to this gentleman's question, you know, I think it's a nice idea that this sort of inherent quality in both senses of that word in a work would elevate the discourse about it or in noble the discourse around it. I mean, quite often, I think, one sees much more frequently the reverse or the inverse of that, which is that a reputation of a work or a writer tends to engender a kind of group think about a new work which actually work doesn't deserve.

So if it's a new book by X, whoever that may be, everyone says, oh, it's a wonderful book because X is wonderful. So, I mean, you know, we may be able to prove this gentleman's suggestion by the negative, you know, corollary, which is that many works of art tend to lower the discourse, the possible possibilities of discourse. Go ahead. Excuse me. Thanks for coming and sharing your thoughts. I have a bit of a ramble. I'll ask the question first and you can cut me off. Do you believe in the degeneration of culture? I mean, culture in the high culture sense? And the reason I ask this is, I sometimes talk about music with people and I write and I talk about maybe the Beatles, a popular band. And people say, well, I think music today is just as good and I look at them and I look at them deep in the eye and I say, you know, these four boys from Liverpool grew up singing Bach and Brahms.

They understood four-part harmony deep in themselves. And when they had an opportunity to perform on the world stage, they remembered something historical from a deeper place. And I don't think no offense matchbox 20 grew up in that culture. I'm just reading, I grew up in the era of the love boat in Fantasy Island. So I wasn't born in an island of classicists. I can tell you when Goford told Julie that he had a crush on her, but I've just started reading democracy in America by Tocqueville. Do you believe in the degeneration of culture? You know, we're a culture eating this very shallow, recycled plastic version of something. And I don't have the answer because I haven't been alive for, I don't know, 2000 years. So I'll just take my question away from the mic. Chip? I don't, I don't actually. I mean, I think arts kind of rise and fall a little bit and they have moments and then they don't, you know, a couple of hundred years ago,

the most popular art form in the world was poetry. And novelists sold the way poets do now. And now poetry is in eclipse. Maybe permanently we'll see. We just talked, there's been a shift, you know, fiction used to be privileged. And now there's a shift away. But, you know, if one art seems to generate a little bit, then another one comes along. And, you know, so it seems to me if you're an alert consumer of culture, you know, there's always something new and there's always something great. And I'm a big fan of classical music. I don't listen to much pop music.

I think there's a lot of terrific classical music being written right now. I think, in spite of what everybody says, there are some wonderful contemporary composers. So I think the world doesn't know about them, maybe. So this notion that it's all going to hell seems a little off to me. And the example I'll use, the other thing that I'm, it's a very important part of my life is sports. And I'm, you know, people would say that ball players were better than, and today's ball players aren't as good. They're crazy. They're wrong. You know, the athletes are so much better conditioned, they're faster, they're stronger. You know, I basically think things get better, not worse. Also, I mean, you know, the history of literature, I mean, going, certainly going back to Greece in Rome, is the history of people thinking that literature is over. You know, it was always better. The older generation was always classier, better disciplined,

the more better structure, you know, and this has been the history of art, you know, since Og first drew a buffalo on the cave wall, you know, and then Og Junior said, God, wasn't that buffalo great? Now all we have is squirrels, you know, or whatever. So I think, I mean, I do think that, you know, one of the, I mean, it goes back to what we want from criticism, and it's impossible because we're all specific to our moment. But you want to always remind yourself that history is an accumulation of an enormous amount of moments. And that, but this is really the history of literature. And you know, every time there's a new technology, and we were talking a lot earlier about the internet, new technologies, and how that's affecting and deteriorating criticism, you know, when they, when the, when the scroll replaced oral poetry, people thought that was the end of literature. And then when they replaced the codex, the codex, the codex replaced the scroll, and it was all over. And, you know, so I think we have to really try, as much as we can, to have a sense of perspective.

And I would just say apropos of classical music, which unlike sports is something I actually know about, there was a lot of really drecky classical music being written in the 18th century, and all you have to do is be an early riser like myself to understand that, because, you know, every classical radio station has a baroque hour, it's from six to eight, and a lot of it is crap. I mean, it's perfectly okay, but it's not great art. It's not, you know, it's just people getting paid by the word, basically, and that's fine too. So I think one has to try to have a perspective, you know. Hi, thank you for your conversation with each other and with us. I wonder if good writing is a consequence of how the pleasure is divvied up, that is for yourself as the writer and for the audience, which also prompts the question, how do you see yourself as separate from or the same as your audience. So, again, the question is about how the pleasure is divvied up,

the pleasure of writing for yourself and the pleasure of writing for your audience. I'll speak for myself first. I see myself as an entertainer, and I get pleasure showing off, I suppose, thinking that other people will like what I do. But I, the notion of writing for myself, it's writing is too hard, I would not write at all, if I didn't think I could entertain someone, please, someone else. Right, that's why I think there should be a balance. Yeah, no, I think it's an interesting idea, and I think, you know, I wonder to go back to an earlier point, the extent to which our response, because my response is the same as your response, which you know very well, is a result of the fact that we, you know, I have no claims to creativity. You know what I mean? I mean, if I were tortured and romantic and wanting to write a great novel, I may have a different answer, but since I see myself as a person in a service industry,

my pleasure in some large sense derives from my ability to provide the service that I'm being paid for, you know, I try to do a good job. The same way as the guy who paints my house is proud when he does a good job, and I say, wow, that was a really good paint job. Or, you know, so I think, in that sense, the fact that we're nonfiction journalists, which is what I put on my tax return, journalists, you know, is that affects our sense of the pleasure. I'm not doing it for myself. Sometimes I'm frustrated because it seems like somebody's taking kind of a hands-off approach and saying, only this is what it is, not this is what I think of it. Well, I mean, I, as I said, you know, criticism is about making judgments, and I think that I would say that the autopsy aspect, which I was talking about before, is only meant to serve the ultimate judgment of whether the machine works, you know, whether the car will run, so to speak.

You know what I mean? So not just for its own pleasure, but the fact that you're trying to figure out how it works in order to see if it does work, but I think criticism is necessarily evaluative. And on the, but just to go back to Pauline Kale for a minute, you know, even if all your evaluations are crazy and wrong, right, or 50% or 30% of them, as we all are, I think what you at least want to do be is interestingly wrong, you know, to say something that has a kind of validity, even if it's very easy to disagree with, but you have to, I think that's the most exciting, to my mind, the most exciting critics. And I grew up, you know, in the 70s as a teenager, reading the New Yorker, and that's where I am, bived my sense of what criticism popular, you know, mainstream criticism should be from Pauline Kale and Andrew Porter and people like that.

But is putting yourself out there, you know, to say, well, this is what I think. And, you know, there's an aspect of that, which is, I think, unpopular, because, you know, the response always is, well, who were you to say? Exactly. And then to which my response is somebody who spent six years in the basement of the Princeton University Library, getting a PhD. But, or wherever it was that you got your education or your thinking, it doesn't have to be education. But I do think that's a crucial part of good, exciting criticism, is when the critic puts him or herself out and says, well, I think X. And you can be wrong. There's nothing wrong with being wrong. There's only something wrong with being stupid. I think there's something else going on these days, which is precisely because reviews can matter so much. There's a tendency on the part of some critics, especially if they are themselves writers in the genre that they're criticizing, to duck, to duck making a judgment. I found this all the time when I was assigning reviews of fiction at the Book of View.

And I quickly grew wary of asking novelists to review novelists, because it was like a guild mentality. You wouldn't say anything bad about anybody in the guild. But I also think it's possible. It's happened to me, this goes back to what I was talking about, about kind of faithful description. I have lots of times read reviews that weren't favorable of a book or a movie that have made me think, well, you know what? I think I want to read that anyway. Or I think that sounds interesting. And one of the things that happens, there's a lot to be said for reading the same critic over and over again, reading Pauline Kale or reading. Because then you get to know where that person is coming from,

and you can kind of calibrate a little bit. You know that on this subject, Pauline is off the wall. So you just filter that into your own reception. But you know, good criticism to me starts a conversation. And it starts a conversation. I like to think that it starts a conversation that you then continue with other people after you have read this book, after you have seen this movie. Then you go and you talk about it some more. Like we don't do enough of that anymore. You know, when I sort of came of age, I can remember when people broke up over movies and over books. You know, they did. It's got much it mattered because you'd go see it. And well, you think that. You think the new Roth is good. I can't go out with you ever again. We don't care about things.

We don't get into it anymore. Woody Allen. People literally broke up over Woody Allen movies. Including Woody Allen. Including Woody Allen. All right. As an aspiring critical thing, I thank you for this dialogue. And so I have a question. I want to re-ingender this conversation about this to the curious existence of the critic and criticism. And what I mean is that the exhaustibility of criticism. What you might write today may no longer be relevant a year from now. It may never be consulted and will be consigned to the dustbin. However, the work that you, so may eloquently compose your criticism about will live on in the pantheon of great works until the end of its days. And yet, sometimes, the critic also functions as a designer where you might look, you may be composed the 100 greatest works of literature from the 20th century. And you'll uncover books that had been forgotten or had never been appreciated but are now being, you know, bestowed with some of the legacy that they so long deserved.

So the curious state of being, sometimes the critic being forgotten and yet being the member of the chronicler. I think both the true. And I think that's one of the things that makes the job hard. That plus the low pay. But I think a critic has to be willing to accept a certain degree of a femurality. And yet, also accept that every now and then, she can make a huge difference. Yeah, I would say, again, you know, I don't write for the ages. You know, I'm just trying to write to my deadline. And I think that's probably a good thing. And I'm perfectly, I'm sure, you know, 90% of the judgments that I've passed on things will turn out to seem silly or dated, certainly dated, you know, that happens fast. And yet, you're a critic that already,

and this doesn't happen to very many, I mean, your essays of your reviews have been collected in a book, which will give them somewhat longer life and deservedly so. I mean, that's a sort of pecking order we have. Not everybody, not every critic makes it into hard covers. Well, okay, but, you know, as here again, as a classicist, I know that 90% of the books that I've written end up in the intestines of rats, you know, so I don't, you know, but I do think that it's very important not to get hung up on the alleged problem of femurality, because we are femoral, you know, very few works of art make it to the long run. And that's fine. You know, it's like what I was saying before, it's not, it's about flawless. You know, these are not the standards of ordinary human life. I mean, we all want great art, but there's a lot of good art.

You know, there's a lot of wonderful movies that are not great movies, and one has to pay attention to those, because we only live in the present of the present and for the present. I don't, you know, we don't know what is going to happen a thousand years from now. And, you know, classes is, when they talk about periods of time, we think in big chunks, you know. And I think, you know, people, I'm all for the specificity of what we're working on. You know, you hope to hit the jackpot, of course, but we won't even know that, because probably some book that I trashed in New York magazine is going to be in 2000 years, you know, the work that everyone holds on to is the great work of the audience. And when they write the biography of the author, you will be Daniel Mendelssohn's Got It Wrong. The amusing footnote. Right, so, but you know what, that's fine too. As I say, and I'm only half joking when I say I'm only trying to make my deadline. You know, I'm, and because it ties into what I was talking about, audiences.

You know, this isn't in a vacuum what we're doing. We're writing about specific things of a certain moment, for specific people living in the present. And, you know, beyond that, it's in the hands of the gods. How can the writer take your criticism and better themselves without clinging to the past and between the new birth that their later work will undergo? That's a very interesting question. You know, a lot of writers don't read critics, and maybe they shouldn't. I don't know that criticism is intended for the author so much as for readers. I think if you're a writer, you want to listen to critics only up to a point. And you need to trust in yourself.

I mean, it almost seems that odds with everything we've been saying, but I think there's some truth to that. But I don't think that criticism is for writers, for the writer. I say that as a person who has sat on both sides of defense. And I do read reviews because I have a brother as a filmmaker, and he never has read any review of anything he does. And that he's allowed to, but I'm a critic. So I have to read criticism because otherwise I'm a hypocrite. I mean, I have to believe it matters. And I always read my reviews, and it's not always pleasant and nice. But I don't think the point of criticism is to educate writers. I think it's to educate readers if there is an educational aspect. And now I'll talk as a writer about how writers think about criticism. I always say this. It's like your children. Your books are like your children. And if you're walking down the street one day with your child, and some stranger comes up to you and say, do you know your child is ugly and stupid?

You're not going to suddenly look at your child and think, oh my god, he's right. He's ugly and stupid. It comes out of you when you have a relationship to it, and you make it in a certain way because that's who you are. And too many things would have to change in order for you to take it as an education. On the other hand, if everyone says a certain thing about something you've written, it probably is right. And if it's something you think is changeable and worth thinking about, you know, whatever it may be, then that's something you pay attention to. Why not? If a lot of smart people say X, then you think, okay, maybe I overdid it, or maybe next time I'll do it in a different way. So, you know, I think there's this sort of little give in both directions. One salutary thing about reading your critics is to be reminded how much it stings. It really does.

And that may temper you a little bit, or at least reminds you when you go to be a critic next time, when you're wearing your critics hat. It's not a bad idea to be reminded that there are human beings create these things, and they do have feelings. And there is some level of responsibility and awareness that want to have about them. Thank you, Daniel. Thank you, Chip.