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

Thank you and welcome to the Cambridge forum tonight we're discussing criticising creativity with Daniel Mendelson and Charles McGrath. Welcome to the Cambridge forum Daniel and Chap. 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 this this presumed tension between the notion of criticism and creativity we think of creativity as as the creative originating act and and criticism as a secondary act. And and maybe we'll get into that later. But let's start in the beginning and say that of course. The criticism is grave 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 involves both thought and imagination. And at a certain level I kind of believe all techs are. Are

involved many of the same problems. So let's put that aside. And then the second thing is let's let's. And this may answer some of the issues that were asked. Let's let's start maybe by trying to make a distinction between reviewing and criticism 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. Add a branch to my work. Yes and I think actually as 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 quality or quantity. You know is it is it a piece of criticism if it's 4000 thousand words in the New York Review of Books. And just to review if it's 400 words on somebodies

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 in its timing in its more commercial in its aims. Maybe its an evaluation of a product that has just appeared for the benefit of an audience who is trying to decide whether to or how to consume that product. So I think thats part of it. I dont 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 X great book has just come out well then they're going to read the Sunday Times and they want to know well. What what is this really and is it something I need to pay attention and that I think there's 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 or whatever the object in question may be. And that is just for the you know the benefit of anyone who is interested in plunging that deeply into the nature of 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 have

different forms and maybe even at some level different souls. I think I think your first point is not you. 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 at it I guess at some levels it involves kind of it's almost a consumer guide kind of thing. I mean we read book reviews we read movie reviews we read music reviews TV reviews and we and and we do that basically and we and we expect the review to answer to questions What is this and is it any good. And I think that evaluative thing is is is way up front.

I think what I think of is criticism does something does something a little different. And I can think of great critics with whom I seldom agreed and yet whom I whom I read with great interest Pauline Kael being a good example. I mean at least half the time I thought it was off the wall and yet I wouldn't miss Pauline Kael piece on the other hand a movie reviewer for a paper a book review for a paper who was consistently that off the mark in my judgment. I would I think I would cease to pay attention to the. There's 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. The when I 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 of of 100 years of the book of the Times Book Review and that meant going back and God help me reading 100 years of the Times Book Review and picking the high points. There weren't many. The it's kind of amazing how a wrong headed that New York Times. Was over a hundred years and how 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 wrongheaded it is and how it does not

pass the test of time and I would argue that criticism as we're talking about might stand up better. Well but I think I think that to sort of give the reviewers say their due. And I've done both you know better than anybody reviewer is because they have to work fast have to come up with an impression and theory of the text or the film or whatever pretty quickly. And you know if you have to make decisions pretty quickly about quality in a way in a work. Hopefully a work of art you can be wrong. You know one of the reasons I loved 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 you don't want you know when you're reading that New Yorkers say to take a weekly example and a book is newly published you know 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 you know as I always like to joke is just getting around to reviewing Moby Dick. But it'll be a great piece you know and it will be right. And so and as the you know as the beneficiary of that system I but also somebody who has worked you know apart from what I did for you at the book review you know 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 were wrong you know and I think that's interesting so I think that I don't I guess I'm I want to not

underestimate the sort of 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 know you hope you're going to be bright 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 the little reviewing. I wish that it were done better across the board. I wish I wish that the people that reviewed our books were better and I wish that were the exceptions that I was to be able to review the movies were better with exceptions. One of the things that troubles me about reviewing right now is is that the increasingly we seem to be in a thumbs up or thumbs down mentality that is all we expect of our reviews.

And and and that puts tremendous pressure on on the review and also it also puts I think undue weight on the review itself. One of the one of the problems that we 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 a break play they can make it it can make or break a movie. You could argue that's always been true because of the Times has authority and because of its its its reputation quite fairly earned for four bring good people and 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 its drama critic and its movie critic variety. The end. They're going to rely on freelancers I guess. But it seems to me that what we're seeing is kind of a a shrivelling up of the outlets where one used to get news about about books about plays about movies. And increasingly it comes down to just a very few venues which which perhaps haven't have been granted more weight than they deserve. Right. Although you know there's a 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. You know what what what. It seems to me to have happened is that the and you know 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 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. So

you know the question that remains is what is the. Precisely because of the essentially private quality of 89 percent of this new criticism let's call it for the time being. You know 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 this sort of blog reviews or blogging for Whit's I've caught a lot of punishment on line when I first sort of question 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 you know that it was just this sort of unchecked effusion. And to my mind you know the problem is is that the 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 blogs and movie blogs and that's you know so I don't want to get into that because then well 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 is 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 couldn't ever say in the New York Times the kinds of things that you can say in 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 instant anybody of so much personal computer right. 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 editors to get back with the comments and all of that. And I think that's a benefit in terms of criticism. You know the I tend to agree the you know the people in the blogosphere and there are a lot of them who have been Tichel especially I'm speaking specifically now about the literary blogs which are the ones I pay the most attention to.

A lot of them are tickled to see the a 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 these are people that 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 two 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 toe the institutional line and they don't and they don't have to and they don't have to buy into the the biases real or imagined. And and there's some there may be some truth to that. The

other thing you were talking about was it interest me is is the business of snarky Inus 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 for critical discourse on the Internet and the blogosphere was was was just vitriolic and irresponsible and 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 and and they'll say things that you can't say or that you're not supposed to. 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 us sort of a balance to more traditional and in certain ways more fettered kinds of expression about culture. I just find it's I do find that the I mean I sort of got into this sort of fray at a point where the 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 back pages of the New York Review of Books. I'm not afraid of you know fisticuffs but there are rules you know and I think that the ad hominem 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. 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 purpose what purpose does it serve. So that can't be bad. But you know what is bad. I have a very specific complaint about the

blogosphere and it will sound selfish and venal but 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 that's. As someone who makes his living writing the notion that you don't get paid for your writing is troubling. But but but there's a larger issue here which is and I'm 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 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 like like editing like like responsible reporting. I think they also disappear very quickly and you get what's what's replacing that kind of traditional marketplace where we're 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 of criticism and it obviously Well it has to because big. And I think it's exactly the inverse of the old economy because if what matters is

not dollars per word rich 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 that 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 youre 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 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 I do think it's a problem. I would I would also want to address another aspect of the thing that you were just talking about the professionalism 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 a given thing is 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 character than if I said the same thing in the New York Review of 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 say if I write something for Bob

silvers 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 about it but it's very interesting how much of it I wonder has to do with how you imagined your audience. So for example do you do you write differently. And I would suggest that you do a little bit when you write for The New York Review and when you write for The New Yorker. Yeah. And you know that does that. I used to notice this. The Book Review and also when I was at the New Yorker there's a downside to this which is that you would I would sometimes ask somebody to write something for me at the New York or write something at the New York Times and and this would have been someone whose work I admired elsewhere. And then the writer would get would have an attack of what I called New

York a writer so itis all of a sudden the writer wouldn't sound like himself anymore the writer would sound like some some awful constricted pale imitation of what he or she imagined the New York or the New York Times ought to sound like but but to go back to it. So it is. So you're 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 is this. Well I don't I mean I don't think so much about the. Maybe I shouldn't say that. I don't think I 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. I'm not writing for me although of course I enjoy working on the pieces that I'm working on. I'm writing 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 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 it would 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 use for the readers of you know New York magazine. But in the sense that. There's a kind of it's a civil civic and civill exercise and 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 3:00 in the morning being pissed off because I didn't like such and 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 these public and largely print forums and the Internet in terms of expansiveness. I mean the other troubling thing about the Internet it seems to me is that is that things get reduced to screengrab or less. I mean and you know now we're now down to Twitter. God help us. And and that also it seems to me is is a is a way in which our culture is is is drifting

and and these other forums give us a chance to be more expansive to be more nuanced. Right OK. Although the interesting flipside of that you know is that sometimes when you've read the sort of personal postings what's extraordinary you really appreciate editors you know because of course the flipside is that you know people write 60000 words about Avatar and you know that by the third paragraph you're in a coma you know. And you know so there's also that you know that's it's either the danger of this 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. Right. Anyway it's again I you know it's always hard to discuss these things and not come off as this sort of fogy But you know to a certain extent I guess I

am just in the sense that I I think that professional criticism is an honorable profession and I and I think it is an old one and a a an important one in the civic. You know in the life of the polity potentially. You know we need critical thinking and being 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 you made a couple of minutes ago Daniel. A distinction where you implied a distinction between criticism at it's 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 highbrow criticism is that it be entertaining. Right. And by that I don't I mean pleasurable the. And that's maybe a way in which we can get around too well. Will 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 and in fact one of the things that troubles me about a lot of academic criticism and

maybe this is maybe of a road we should not down but now that 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 and you're not smart enough and you're not dull enough. Right well. But you could I mean just to. I mean I share your opinion as you know but you could say well but it's and it's entertaining to other academics. You know it's serving the purpose of criticism because other people who are in that club speak that lingo find it great you know 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't comment on it. You know I spent three months in a course on Dardar

once and I had to lie down with a cold compress. So 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 good writing. 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 it has sort of corrupted way. You know you can only tell the story you know of you know 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 viewer or aesthetic product that that's well made it entertains or gives us pleasure. Sure. I mean Edmund Wilson is an entertainer you know entertaining writing writer even though he's not saying outrageous things just to get attention but it seems he's just OK. 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 that was the bottom line. I mean before I cared about anything else about you was a critic.

Your credentials your and I mean actually I mean you personally the you know what appealed to me was that you could write and. And that seems self-evident it seems obvious but but it's not. I mean good writing to me is good thinking and good writing is is is writing that expresses that thinking and you know in a way that's clear entertaining. It's not a commodity that's that's there for the picking. All over the place. And and I think in some ways it's it's it's it's something that that some of our critics have neglected. In their rush to get on to something else. Well but that's what I mean when when I talk about thinking about your audience you know I'm always aware that I'm writing for people and that I can't lose them. I can't bore

them although I'm sure I often do. I I know a sense I mean sense 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 one more because I was trained as a scholar. You know I'm more aware than ever of the fact that I have 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 need. They need

to have things explained to them. I don't say that in the condescending way I don't understand things about astrophysics and if 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 you know there is this quality of you know to say oh such a so-and-so was a good writer and so was it. It's it's thinking about who you're writing for. I mean I could write about Europe cities for example you know for 69000 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 to perform it. I think that's what makes good writing I think good writing also has to do with service serving your service and also also making connections. I mean I think I think the reason that people went to so often dialed 1 800 Mister classics was because that was what once

may have seemed like an interesting shtick. OK here we get we get a classics professor a Ph.D. to review 800 or to review. Brad Pitt in Troy. It turns out that every time you did it it ceased to be a dick. You knew it. You did for me and for a lot of people. You reminded us of this classic tradition that perhaps some of us had 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 ought to do. And maybe that's one of the differences if we if we want to arrive at it between a review and criticism is criticism does

something more. Maybe it makes connections it brings in other contexts too far. Well I think that's something criticism can do. I mean I think I think you know whenever I think of criticism as opposed to reviewing You know I think of criticism as a as a full autopsy of a you know there's this object on the table and you're going to take it apart and figure out how it how it works and how all the pieces go together. And and you don't have that leisure when you're just writing a review and you don't. That's not necessarily our 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 you were talking a little bit about on the train coming up and then we decide we can 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 have brought up some interesting. Points about the sort of the his recent history of criticism and these debates about whether criticism is creative. I mean I think the word creative is so vexed 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 created in the sense that it arrives in the world. Ex-NBA Hillo you know I mean everything is parasitic on something even novels even symphonies you know nothing is is is totally new and I think the criticism looks worse so to speak because it's obviously parasitic on another object. Well I just think creativity is the problematic word really.

But 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 of very distinguished literary critics. In my mind many of them associated with what was then thought of as the Yale School of criticism got impatient with the notion that they were practicing a secondary art that that a work of criticism was not as if we can't say creative not as valuable not as special as as as the novel as a novel or a poem and so on. And because these were were very distinguished and brilliant critics they said no criticism is an art. It stands just as high in the in the firmament and they pointed to people like Walter Pater and people like that said Look at that. That's we read that as art.

And so OK and then the curious thing was then having done that having having ennobled or empowered. Criticism and sort of promoted it up the Pantheon what they produced was god awful. It was just you know it was it was this stuff that was very heavily influenced by the French by by and by Bart. And as I recall it was it was it was every bit every sentence had parentheses within parentheses it was all this this this kind of punning discourse and. And not unless I'm mistaken not surprisingly that movement died out. You don't. You don't hear Geoffrey Hartman or Harold Bloom anymore. Claiming that there are still very great literary critics you don't hear them

kind of claiming now that they're there that they're critical art they're critical practice is on the same level. So that raises the question why 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 the 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 it's more inspired and harder and more wonderful to write a novel than to write a documentary text say is a prejudice that's so deeply ingrained and I have to guess 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 no bull inspired or difficult to write a novel than it is to write a good piece of the word journalism. I mean just because one refers to an object in the real world the real object in the real world ostensively 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 to you know I was very gratified when a book was published in France where they make you know and everyone kept saying oh you know I loved your home man. And you know having taken high school and friends I thought a moment a novel and they basically refer to anything you know as a mom. That's a sort of a 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 on

parasitic divides are 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 anyways so I just think we have to leave behind these kinds of distinctions which I think are increasingly sort of otiose in some way. I tend to agree but I'm not sure I can I can go all the way because one thing that strikes me as curious and it's and it's been it's been a shift and shift kind of culturally a shift certainly in publishing

in the last 15 to 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 and and and we well we give credence certainly when we go to the bookstore. We we we I mean and this is I guess what I'm talking about is the way that memoir as to a very considerable extent usurped the novel. And and I'm curious why is that. Just because because it's because it's true. And yet it turns out of course a lot of them aren't true. And and then and then and then

when they're not true and when they're exposed as as false the memoir says well I'm getting at the emotional truth well that's what the novelist was getting at. Right. Right. Well but I mean that you know as you know as I think has a lot to do with something not within the genres themselves but is sort of a large cultural shift or a problem or a crisis about what reality actually is. You know I mean it seems like a nutty thing to say. But in in in the world where reality is essentially private then who's to say that the novel is more valid than the memoir. Right. This is my right. You know that's always the sort of the defense the self-defense of the phony memoirist. All right well it was my trews right. 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 age of psychoanalysts

psychoanalysis you know you you get you're on shaky ground questioning you know because we are told that people have their own emotional issues and all of 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. I was part of my interest and Jesus I also like a good thing we didn't know that I'm about to be correct. Well we do have to ask that we try to close. And so first off chip I was going to ask you when you say writing is good writing leads to pleasure or pleasurable feeling when you expand it to just saying if there's depth of feeling and that's good writing as opposed to pleasure. Depth of feeling and and and thought I guess I. Guess 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 did. I think it's perhaps all those things. But I I kind of I always want to lean a little bit on on 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 and and that's not to say that you can't be transported by ideas you can be immensely entertained by reading Daniel Mendelsohn's piece this week in the in the in the New York Review about Avatar. It's funny it's surprising it's insightful in 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 at least writing within this forum he's not writing just to get some things off his chest. Right. I would say you know it's funny as you mentioned that I thought it but you wouldn't ever feel the impulse to be funny if you were just writing for yourself. You know what I mean. I mean that would be weird. I think well you would know better because you're a psycho analyst but I just think if I sat there sort of dying. You know and I knew no one is ever going to read it then I would be worried about myself. And 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 Reiffel or fail. 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 he had a lot of the same content on chip with your

book where you have the sections you're trying to predict what will be long lasting over centuries. I got the impression right. I wasn't I wasn't trying to predict I was trying I was trying to to say how badly the Times got things wrong and that's it. And that's a little different from from from what happened to angels and that which is what happens to lots of works of art. I think that over time they evolve. Now that the the thing about the the section was just it's was to point out the unreliability of these snap judgments that we do. We do ask people to make the. You know it would be much easier if if you had asked the person who reviewed Catcher In The Rye. If you asked them to write it a year later you might have more nearly got it right. I mean it's hard to get to get these things right especially 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 engaged in criticism you're always talking about a moving target. And and you 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 05 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 a different sense of this play about AIDS. But you know here as a classicist I wanted to say you know to what extent does it matter because the work is the work and it has to work wherever whatever the context is I could say about you repartees Trojan Women that it was written or as some you know many people believe it as a response to a certain atrocity that was committed during the course of the Peloponnesian War. Thing

that most people who see the Trojan Women neither know and perhaps should not care about as audiences sitting in the 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 what is a moving target. We don't know what people are going to think of Angels in America or Catcher In The Rye in the air for a thousand and ten 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 that would be if it were literary criticism. You look at the actual words you looked at the of the construction of the words in a sentence you look at the color and richness of the sentence and you 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 and maybe even before being entertaining the first job is a kind of reportorial honesty seems to me the critic has got to describe the work of art in a way that is honest and and to what to what it is and takes the work of art on its own terms and it seems to me to start from there. This is what this is this is a play about whatever. This is a novel about it. It is written in such in such a way. This movie is filmed inside 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 reportorial 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 to say this is a memoir of. Abuse or something you know that 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 should I talk about the language or 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 can take and you know so there are things like that then there is somebody and I know you know people probably stone me for saying this but you know there are great novelists who are not great writers. George Eliot I think it's not a great writer and it's wrote Theodore Dreiser a terrorist or a worse writer. So I think that if you're right and 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 a certain And then there are lyrically beautiful novels of language where it is like the English Patient 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 like 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 a 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 are a reviewer and critic if you looked at a McCulloch 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 that if when I was at the New York Times I would probably not assign the same person to review a McCollough biography and a Philip Roth novel. You would you would I would get probably probably well Mendelssohn to do both but 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 went Roth to the other. Again this is about the AIDS epidemic. But if the movie Philadelphia. You know yeah I'm going to let you all ask questions. I'll finish I'm sorry. I just have to ask one more about Philadelphia. There's one scene where Tom Hanks is dancing with his ivy Paul 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 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. OK go ahead but everything is flawed. You know I mean it you know the crime the criterion is not flawlessness because then we would have very little to read or watch. You know I just think that's again you know you have to look at the it's like having children. Right. This is what you're dealing with. You know you should say you want him to be blonder or the doctor or whatever but you know that's what you've got and that's what you've got to deal with and that's fine. OK. 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 in class just to boot. I'm curious what you think of the of the the wild idea of the critics role as the person who validates the piece for everyone else. And if you can perhaps fix the vertigo of a moving piece. Well you know in a way being a classicist makes it hard for me to respond to that. Although Wilde was a classicist as we know because. You know what validates. A work of art is. I mean whatever that means you know is there a lot more factors and

time is one of them. And mass reception is another one so I'm I'm I don't like to think that a critic is the person who validates the work of art you'd like you'd like to think that a critic can be in a position to. Yes I would. Yeah. The that a critic could draw attention to a work of art that is deserving of attention or that. Or even just someone who helps 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 Faberge egg apart 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 it did 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 Alman did that for Joyce cleanthe. Brooks did that for Faulkner. I was just going to say go Gore Vidal did that for Dan Powell though the process may have begun before and Vadar time of Vidal coming up on the train. He did that for for a couple of people so that that happens. And it's great. I mean to me that maybe 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

that it happens. Thank you. To follow up on a little bit because I can't the Creator of. The piece actually wrote want to say those. Create the critics so to speak. Does the can the quality of the work or the reputation of the author what artists are the playwright or the translator or whatever actually elevate the criticism. That's really an interesting I I kind of want to say yes because it's I mean you would 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

may create a kind of critical discourse. It also raises 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 that they wrote about Harold the great Harold Rosenberg the great art critic you know was pals with all of all the painters that he wrote about and he really saw his job as kind of furthering their thinking. And there are critics you know 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 from a newspaper tradition of impartiality and

disinterestedness. But but I think in a in a perfect world a critic ought not to be too close to the Creator. You can be as close as he wants to the work of art. But and again going back to the point about moving targets I mean at a certain point it doesn't matter what the it doesn't matter what Tony Tony Kushner thinks angels is about it matters what we think 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 sort of in some inherent quality in both senses of that word in a work would elevate the discourse about it or or. And 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 it's wonderful. So I mean you know we may be able to prove this gentleman suggestion by the negative you know corollary which is that many works of art tend to lower the discourse the possible possibilities of discourse. Susan thanks for coming in and sharing your thoughts. I have a bit of a ramble. I ask the question first and you can cut me off. Do you believe in the degeneration of culture and 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 why 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 these four boys from Liverpool grew up singing Bach and Brahms they understood four part harmony deep in themselves and when they were 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 and Fantasy Island so I wasn't born on the island of classicists. I can tell you when gopher told Julie that he had a crush on her but I've just started reading democracy and I'm in America by Tocqueville. Do you 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 my. Ship.

I don't I don't actually I mean I think I think art's kind of rise and fall a little bit and they have they have moments and then they and then they don't. You know a couple of hundred years ago the most popular art form in the world was in the English speaking world was poetry and people and you know novelists soul the way poets do now. And now poetry is is in Eclipse maybe permanently we'll see. We just talk. There's been a there's been a shift. You know fiction used to be privileged and now this is a shift away but you know if one art seems to degenerate a little bit then another one comes along and you know so it seems to me if you if you are an alert consumer of culture you know there's

always something new and there's always something great. I am a big fan of classical music I don't listen to much pop music I like because 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 we do know about them maybe so. 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 is a very important part of my life is sports and you know people that say that ballplayers were better than today's ballplayers aren't as good. They're crazy. They're wrong. You know the athletes are so much better conditioned the faster they're stronger. You know I 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 and Rome is the history of people thinking that literature is over. You know it was always better the older generation was always classier or better disciplines the more better structure you know and this has been the history of art you know since of first do a buffalo on the cave wall you know and then Junior said God wasn't that Buffalo great. Now all we have is squirrels 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 a 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 and new technologies and how that's affecting and deteriorating credit you know when they when that when that scroll replaced oral poetry.

People thought that was the end of live one and then when they were told that 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 is unlike sports is something I actually know about. There was a lot of really directly 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 OK 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 out. 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 I the notion of writing for myself it's running is too hard. I would not write at all if I didn't think I could I could entertain some please someone else. Right. That's why I think there should be a balance. You know 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 is your response which you know very well this is a. Result of the fact that we are 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 the 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 non-fiction journalist which is what I put on my tax return. Journalist you know is is that affects our sense of the pleasure. I'm not doing it for myself and sometimes I'm frustrated because it seems like somebody is 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. 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 are trying to figure out how it works in order to see if it does work. But I think criticism is necessarily evaluated. And on the book just to go back to camp Pauline Kael for a minute you know. Even if all your evaluations are crazy and wrong. Right. Or 50 percent or 30 percent of them as we all are. I think what you at least want to do B is interesting Lee Roth 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 by my sense of what criticism popular you know mainstream criticism should be from Pauline Kael and Andrew Porter and people like that. Is 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 are 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 Ph.D. 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 and nothing wrong with being wrong is only something wrong with being stupid. Hey I think there's something else going on these days which is 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 review and I quickly grew wary of asking novelists to review novelists because it was like a guild mentality. You wouldn't say you wouldn't say anything bad about anybody in the guild. The 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 and read reviews that weren't favorable of a book or movie and that have made me think you know what I think I want to read that anyway. Or I think that sounds interesting and. You know. 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 Kael or reading. Because then you get to know where that person is coming from and you can get kind of calibrate a little bit. You know you know that on this subject. Pauline is off the wall. So you just you just feel you just you know filter that into your own your own reception. But you know I think a 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 and you have seen this movie then. Then you go and you talk about it some more I think 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. How much it mattered

because you go see it and why you think that you think that you think the new Roth is good vibe can't go out with you ever again. I mean we don't care about that we don't get into it anymore Woody Allen people literally broke up over Woody Allen movies including Woody Allen. All right as an aspiring critic I thank you for this dialogue. And so I have a question I want to engender the conversation about the curious existence of the critic and criticism. I mean is that the exhaust ability of critics 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 eloquently compose your crystal about will be will live on you know the pantheon of great works. Until the end of days and yet sometime the critic also functioned as a sustainer where you might look you made maybe compose 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. But still with the legacy that they so long deserved. So the curious state of being. Sometimes as a critic being forgotten and yet being a member of the chronicler I think I think both are true. And I think that's one of the things that makes it makes the job hard. That plus the low pay. But I think a critic has to be willing to accept a certain degree of ephemerality. And yet also. Accept that that every now and then he or she can make a huge difference to again. You know I don't write for the ages. I just try to write to my deadlines. And I think that's probably a good thing and I'm perfectly I'm sure you know 90 percent 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 and yet and yet you're a critic that already and this doesn't happen to very many. I mean your essays your reviews have been collected in a book which will give them a somewhat longer life and deservedly so. I mean I guess that's a sort of pecking order we have not everybody not every critic makes it into hard covers. Well OK. But you know here again as a classicist I know that 90 percent of the book ever written end up in the intestines of rats. You know so I don't I don't you know but I do think that it's very important not to get hung up on the the alleged problem of morality because we are ephemeral. 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 just about flawless. You know

these are not the standards of ordinary human life. I mean we all want great art. And 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 know. We don't know what is going to happen a thousand years from now. And you know classicists when they talk about periods of time we think in big chunks you know and I think you know people I am all for the specificity of what we're working on and we you know you hope 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 you know holds onto is the great work. And when they write the biography of the author you will be Daniel Mendelsohn got it wrong the amusing foot you know.

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. 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 betraying the new birth that they later work well on the go. That's a very interesting question you know a lot of writers don't read critics and and and maybe they shouldn't. I don't know that. I don't know that criticism is intended for the author so much as as as for readers the I think you want a list. I think if you're a writer you want to listen to your critics only

up to a point. You need to trust in yourself. I mean it's almost seems at 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 a writer for the right. I say that as a person who has sat on both sides of the fence 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 as if there is an educational aspect and you know and now I'll talk as a writer about how writers think about criticism that I always say this. You know 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. You know 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 you 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 it's 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 OK 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.

One Salvatore thing about reading your critics is to be reminded how much it stings. It really does. And and that may temper you a little bit or at least remind you when you go to be a critic next time when you're wearing your critics hat. It's not a bad idea to run. There are human beings create these things and they do have feelings. And there is some. Level of responsibility and awareness that one ought to have about them. Thank you Daniel. Thank you CHEP