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As reviewers, is this our motto? (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
It started at 13, but it grows. I do not have a
Unified Field Theory of Reviewing, but I work in that direction. We are up to 52 insights.
1)
For purposes of this class, I
consider reviewing an act of journalism, something done quickly, accurately and
insightfully but still the act of a generalist, by someone who knows a little
about a lot. Like journalism, the teaching of reviewing is pragmatic. One
shares with students the formulas - the cookie cutters that work perfectly well
if you have assembled "good" ingredients - that allow the student to
produce useful analysis quickly, efficiently and without anguish. Is this
approach a disservice to the students? For, as in all journalism, in reviewing
our ideal is to know the formula but to go beyond it when we can, to surprise
our readers and perhaps ourselves.
2)
What’s
the difference between a regular feature story describing something like the
labyrinth walk and a review of the walk? I would say that certain implied
aspects of the former become more explicit in the latter. The review is more
explicitly subjective, more comfortably judgmental, more direct in suggesting something
is worth doing – or not. Objectivity (a word I hate when it comes to journalism
since journalism is not science) isn’t a particularly useful idea in vetting a
review. I prefer Fair and Balanced when it comes to the journalist’s work. But
in reviewing? Broadly. Very broadly.
3)
Accuracy
in reviewing? Absolutely. Non-negotiable.
4)
Since
this class is called Arts Reviewing and Reporting – and because one of the
things I dislike about some reviews is their plethora of unmoored, undefined
adjectifying (more to come on that) – each review must have some basic consumer
information, such as times, dates, places, costs, contact numbers for the thing
reviewed. That strikes me as Fair and Balanced. (See #1.)
5)
A
variation on the preceding paragraph. I want description in any review done for
this class. Employ the senses. Don’t merely describe the thing itself but at
least consider the possibility of describing the audience, the venue. This may
be particularly important in the music review because this is one of those corners
of popular culture where my ignorance is particularly vast. Describing the music may be hard – though
it’s certainly worth doing. Describing the bands and fans? Easy.
6)
You
can’t do a good review without understanding your audience, which is just another
way of saying you need to figure out if your reader shares your frame of
reference. Everyone has Ph.D. knowledge in some areas and kindergarten
knowledge in others: “George Washington, first president of the United States
of America, a nation-state located on the North American continent, one of the
principal land masses on the third planet in a minor star system on the fringes
of our galaxy ….” (Note to self: Just what is a nation-state anyway?)
7)
What
I am doing here, collecting fragmentary insights about a topic, is
characteristic of many reviews. They proceed by association, with no clear
through-line or nut graph. What is the structural sine qua non of an effective review?
8)
Yes,
you in back. What is a sine qua non?
Does context make the meaning clear? How often should a reviewer challenge
readers by using vocabulary that some of them may not understand? Under what
conditions might this be acceptable? More to the point, is it ever desirable?
9)
The
first thing you have to learn in review writing is to go into the experience
with some specific expectations if – like me – you tend to let the experience
flow over you without exactly thinking about it. Start the Thinking Machine early. As in any
reporting, you are ready to go where the experience takes you. But you want to
make sure you get something out of it. The reviewer as blank slate: Sometimes
that just doesn’t work. You need some general ideas about the art form – its
history, its current state - going in, and also about this particular thing and
its creator, if such information is in the air.
10) Corollary to the preceding: Unless you
are some Big Wonder Brain with total recall, you are going to need to take
notes. That’s what makes reviewing specific. You have given your brain one more
thing to do. You have to be thinking about your own thinking and writing it
down. Perhaps, your top reviewers don’t need to do this? We’ll ask.
11) Just read a
review of “It’s a Wonderful Life” in Salon that makes the point that “It's
darker than you remember and speaks to our times.” Two words for reviewers:
revisionist and/or contrarian. Or,
maybe, three words: recognizing the obvious when others seem to have overlooked.
12) A
colleague says all ethical questions are actually questions about money in the
sense that if a choice doesn’t threaten – or benefit – somebody’s pocketbook
(probably yours), it’s just an intellectual exercise, an easy call. I wonder if
the same thing could be said of discussions of what Art is. Craft is useful and
justifies itself. Art is that mysterious thing that, by definition, justifies
itself without being useful. The Artist unapologetically exerts effort that does
not profit her/him, which effort could be turned to profit elsewhere. (Real $profit$
even if only by picking up cans by the side of the road. Not some gauzy notion
of personal growth.) To label something as Art means it is worth doing even if
it is not useful and, by definition, all useful things have financial value.
Therefore, all discussions about Art are about what human activity lies within
the charmed circle where whether it pays or not is irrelevant. This is a
profoundly subversive notion in a capitalist society, is it not?
13) Let’s keep this going. Thus, is an Artist who
wants to be rich and famous that much less of an Artist? Does anyone really
admire an Artist who isn’t in it for the money, and whose Art – I’m talking the
category/type/kind/genre of Art rather than its execution – clearly will never
make her/him a dime?
14) Some reviews are written with great certainty,
which makes the reader a spectator. Some reviews are a self-conscious debate
with the reader. And some reviews are a reviewer’s debate with himself/herself.
Time to bring in the Keats:
'At
once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially
in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously- I mean Negative
Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties. Mysteries, doubts,
without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.'
15) I don’t want to forget one of my
“unthoughts,” a fundamental premise when it comes to dealing with reviewers.
Like columnists, theirs is a cumulative effect. You learn the reviewers’
tendencies, both stylistic and aesthetic. They build trust, though by that I
mean trust you will enjoy them, not agree with them. (Of course, there is also
trust in taste.) Drawing on the opportunity to use an eight-penny word, a
reviewer has an oeuvre, a body of work,
and it is in that context that you evaluate her/him. (Of course, we read
“one-off” reviews. But for this course, we’re concentrating on the committed
reviewer.)
16) But every review is read each time by someone
for the first time! Can we tease out those qualities that help a reviewer gain
readers rather than simply not losing them? Or am I inventing a distinction
that does not exist?
17) Definitions of Art are like splatter paintings
(he said). Throw some ideas against the wall, and your mind will connect the dots.
That said, I do think that one of the most useful ideas about Art is that, by
definition, it means different things to different people and that time treats
it kindly, either in the sense that succeeding ages return to a piece of
something (recall previous sentence: often with confounding new
interpretations) or in the sense of rewarding extended contemplation, repeated
exposure to. Hence my interest in an article in The Weeklings (“Rogue
Commentary for Now People”) about movies that you can watch again and again
with deepening pleasure. It’s
called “Watch Me Two Times.”
18) Simple, simple. A review is either instructive
(to the reader) Or corrective (to the artist or art form). Or both. Right?
19) Let’s quantify as much as we can. How many
words that your average reader doesn’t know is it advisable to use in a review?
I mean using the word without a, “that is…,” or other explanatories. Are there
audiences who expect you to do a little of this?
20) Real reviewers don't read other reviews before reviewing.
If you do that, you're a critic! That said, it's an
understandable temptation. A
reviewer might want to cheat because she/he didn’t know what to write, and all of
us often read reviews because we don’t know what to think. It's not only a
matter of having your understanding deepened by reading those reviews that say
what you "have often thought but ne'er so well expressed," it's also
when you read a review that surfaces how you feel about a piece of art because
the review gets it wrong. Think of the review as the precipitant that causes
ideas to form out of your supersaturated thoughts. (Yes, I looked it up.) Their
wrong words help you find your right ones. But that's not a backdoor I want to
leave open in this class.
21) One reason I read reviews,
and not the least important: so I will have some cocktail party chatter. Does
this generation of students have so convenient a shorthand for the urge to seem
to know more than you do?
22) We will begin the semester
with one word around which all else will form concentric circles. That word is
“audience,” as in your audience for your review. But that word may change as
the semester progresses. What other words come to mind, younglings?
23) Beware, young reviewer, of those things –
bits of knowledge, philosophical and ethical truths -- you consider self
evident, so self evident you build your review upon them and then discover no
one else considers them self evident. However, recognizing such assumptions and
then stepping back to explore why you think so is always a good day's work.
24) And never forget never forget that
talking about or listening to others talk about questions that can never be
answered is itself an appetite and perhaps a necessity.
25) “Hierarchy of genre.” Thank you, New York
Times wine page (of all places).
26) I’m assuming a key question for a reviewer is:
What do my readers know and when did they know it? I'm assuming that for many
readers of a review, back in the day there was a good deal of innocence and
ignorance of the particular piece of art (let us say a movie) as they awaited
the review. But now, with the twitter and the Facebook and the email, both
sweeping up and originating information and sending that information glancing
off you, I'm thinking it could be harder to gauge just how much information
your reader already has and exactly what kind of information –project
financing, evolution of the script, actor tantrums, Hollywood buzz – you need
to include and explain. (Or do you just ignore that stuff and focus on the
thing itself.) In other words, your potential audience may be less homogeneous,
more fragmented, than it once was. On the other hand, probably the smart
editors have already confronted this challenge – niche publications have always
been with us - and your audience will be there prescreened and thus easier for
you to focus on.
27) A
game to play, particularly with movie reviews: How many reviewers –
or copy editors - succumb to the obvious comparison (frequently insulting but
not always) or image or bad pun.
This is probably an index to the audience written for.
28) Jean
Renoir's remarks on theories: “You know, I can't believe in the general ideas,
really I can't believe in them at all. I try too hard to respect human
personality not to feel that, at bottom, there must be a grain of truth in
every idea. I can even believe that all the ideas are true in themselves, and
that it's the application of them which gives them value or not in particular
circumstances … No, I don't believe there are such things as absolute truths,
but I do believe in absolute human qualities—generosity, for instance, which is
one of the basic ones.”
(Quoted in Sarris, Interviews with Film Directors , p. 424)
29) Reading
a movie review this morning, I re-realized an elemental fact about reviewing: A
plausible generalization said exceptionally well short circuits critical
thinking because the form argues for the truth of the content. Hemingway’s Jake
Barnes said, "Isn't it pretty to
think so.” More like, if what you say is pretty enough, then I’ll think so,
too.
30) A very long time ago I read Shirley
Biagi’s book on interviewing in which she referred to Sam Donaldson’s great
interviewing secret which (he said) was to ask a series of unrelenting “why’s”
no matter how the first “why” was answered. Might that work for reviewing if
only in internal dialogue? I liked the movie. (Why?) It made me smile (Why?)
When the house blew up for one thing? (Why did that make you smile?) Everyone
would like to blow up something. (Why would you like to blow up something?) Because every day in every way people like
you keep asking me these stupid questions…. Of course, there are limits to
this method since you have to adjust the questions to the particular thread you
want to follow, so you can’t do it mechanically. But too often journalists do
draw back from that nosy question that takes the journalist into her/his own
discomfort zone. The same thing can be true of reviewing. Be ruthless with
yourself. An idea hits you, and you write it down. Ask yourself why and answer
your question in the review. Dig down underneath the bland generalization to
the specific and the personal. Isn’t a review – a really good review - a form
of confession? (Talk amongst yourselves.)
31) I
will boldface the part of the comment most relevant to review writing: Also
weighing in on Django's use of the (N-word) is Sarah Silverman who
told TMZ, "Doesn't it take place like during
slavery? Wouldn't it be odd if they didn't have that horrific word in it?"
The comic added that (Spike) Lee has "got a lot of mishegas with a lot of
art. I think you can't really tell art
what to do."
32) Talking
about David Denby and his attack on snark (which I define as glib sarcastic
bitchiness for its own sake): Denby's
larger concerns center on the "enormous changes in journalism"
transpiring as more newspapers shift from print to the Web. He worries that this shift might diminish
some forms of journalism — investigative reporting, well-reported sports
stories, arts criticism — or even cause them to disappear.
33) But let’s be honest: It’s easier to write
a negative review than it is to write a positive review, if you’re aiming at
entertaining. If you don’t know what schadenfreude is, you
will be a spiritually deficient reviewer.
34) For the first few weeks of the semester,
our Word of the Day will be “audience.” But at some point, I think we will
grant that honor to “modesty.” Or has that quality become more burden than
benefit to the aspiring reviewer?
35) Andrew O’Hehir says: “Well, listen – the
next time the movie beat gets boring I’ll write another essay proclaiming the death of film culture. Apparently
that was all it took to perk things up! Actually,
the widely misinterpreted point I was trying to make, which was that film no
longer holds the position of cultural centrality it once did, on either the
highbrow or mass levels, remains valid. Even amid the undoubted richness of
this fall and winter season, you can find examples of this: While films like Paul Thomas Anderson’s
“The Master” and Michael Haneke’s “Amour” pile up rave reviews and critics’ group
awards, they don’t resemble what the general public thinks of as a movie, and
the number of Americans who pay to see them in a movie theater may not exceed
the audience for a single episode of a hit cable show. (My No. 1 pick of
the year, which will no doubt be described as an eccentric choice, failed to
gross even $100,000 in the United States. That’s more like the audience for a
cable-access show. In Polish.)”
36)
Mason
Monroe on the difference between movie critic and movie reviewer: “There is no bar to entrance to the critical pantheon. Is it that
a critic sees a movie, thinks about it and then writes about it, while a
"reviewer" sees a movie and writes about it without thought? I mean,
this student likes film, right? What I would recommend to an aspiring
movie reviewer (or aspiring film critic for that matter) is to watch a lot of
movies. Watch them in theaters, watch them on TV or video. Find out what you
like. Read some other critics/reviewers--I'd start with Ebert and Kael, but
there's also Andrew Sarris, Molly Haskell, Manny Farber, Parker Tyler, Jim
Hoberman, Ruby Rich, Mike Sragow, John Anderson. Read Truffaut's book-length
interview with Hitchcock. Read Kevin Brownlow's The Parade's Gone By about
silent film. Then watch more movies.”
37)
Art is a conversation
with the culture. Reviewing is talking back.
38)
This is Josh Micah
Marshall of Talking Points Memo explaining a blog post he did about gun
culture. But you could also apply it to review writing: “There are many pieces I write not to convince
or advocate but simply to capture as clearly as I can a certain perception or
belief. They also help me learn more about the topic at hand and often more
about myself. Much of what I wrote in this post was not to advocate or convince
anyone but simply to capture an experience that seems too little unexpressed
but is shared by many, many people.”
39)
Reading a review can
be like having a really smart friend - and sometimes like having a really smart
friend who is arrogant but entertaining a little of whom goes a long way.
40)
In art we reach across
time, distance, class, circumstance – across any of the barriers that separate
us – to find what the ‘mysterious other’ thinks. Reviews also do that in
shorthand. If art is a mirror, what do others see in the mirror?
41) Matt Weiner, Mad Men creator: “And
then there’s people’s projections about what the story means and it is
often very personal. People will approach me with a take on a story that has nothing to do with what I was trying to
say but has a lot to do with who they are, and as a writer that is —
even if it’s incredibly negative — it’s a very exciting experience.”
42) More from MW that can also be said to apply to the reviewer as
ignorant audience (in a good way): “It
may make me old-fashioned, but I love
the idea of someone sitting in their living room and not knowing anything, not
even the guest star, and the writers and directors and actors controlling the audience’s
experience the first time that they see it. I understand people’s
attachment to these characters and this show, and that gives me a lot of
pleasure. Their curiosity and anticipation is something that you pray for.”
43) Let’s tease out the obvious. Of course, you begin the review
with something interesting. But where does the “interest” kick in? First word?
First sentence? No later than the third sentence and you can only wait that
long when the first two sentences are in parallel structure and suggest a
payoff is coming? Indeed, certain publications and/or certain writers have a
reputation that convinces you that even when the beginning is slow, there will
be a heck of a payoff: The fuse is burning, but there will be an explosion. I
think of some articles in the New Yorker back in the day which seemed to
reprimand you (by their willful dullness) for wanting a slam-bang beginning.
44) Also, what interests and what doesn’t. Depends on the audience,
right?
45) What I want to ask of reviewers: What they actually do? For
example, how long after the experience do they write the review? And I also
want to ask: If you had world enough and time, how long after the experience
would you write the review? I am assuming professional reviewers with deadlines
– or people with actual lives who have other, and possibly even better, things
to do.
46) That deadline question makes me think of the S.J. Perlman quote:
“I write faster than anyone who writes better and better than anyone who writes
faster.” Are reviewers of that category of writers whose work is better because
it must be written more quickly rather than more slowly? Whoa. Does such a
category exist?
47) Yeah, what about the value of limitation in the creation of Art?
Robert Frost said something like writing poetry without meter is like playing
tennis without a net. (A lesson to all of us: I recalled the quote as “without
rhyme.”) Matisse said, “A
large part of the beauty of a picture arises from the struggle which an artist
wages with his limited medium.” So let’s all paint with our feet, right? Well,
no. This can get silly pretty quick. But the role of limiting means in the
creation of Art – I don’t think this paragraph has exhausted the topic (which
says something right there.)
48) I bark about how flaccid those reviewers are that rely on
sweeping, empty generalizations, but, from a practical point of view,
thoughtful, well-developed judgments are like gold nuggets in a sieve, or like
base hits in baseball. (Three hits out of ten over time and you’re an All
Star.) Not every paragraph is as specific and well-argued as it might be.
Terrific moments of insight or argument or eloquence will cause us to forgive
the quick judgments with which the review is interleaved: “Abercrombie and
Fitch were strong in supporting roles.” The reviewer establishes credibility
and then draws on it.
49) This morning I started on
my little list of bits of advice for this class. The first item? Modesty. Of
course you have the right to an idiosyncratic take but strain to understand how
others will take what you are consuming. Call it cultural awareness or call it
zeitgeist. (Of course the charm of certain kinds of irony is your conviction
that the average reader/watcher *doesn't* get it. You do. You are part of the
elite.)
50) Synchronicity. Friend Berger writes: The further
student reviewers “stray from journalism the more problematic their writing
will become. Seems to me the twentysomethings are more opinionated than ever
these days. Must have something to do with living in public and viewing your
life like a movie that provides entertainment for others. And the bigger the
opinion the shallower the knowledge. I would rather they wrote with humility
and description than big opinions, which 9 times out of 10 will not be stated
from within the subject at hand, but from without, as this is what I think,
which is not the same as this is what this movie, song, play made me think
because of the way it is presented.”
51) Back to hierarchy of genres, as I note my link
on the class blog to something called “TV up, Movies down.” Speaking generally,
we must not forget that shifting hierarchies in the arts – more than the word
“genre” encompasses – influence our degree of attention and respect. Our
personal hierarchy tells much about age, class and social aspiration. We all
wear our cultural “badges.”
52) I said this in (11), and I’ll say it again.
When in doubt, think contrarian. Of course, you have to Write Smart when you
are applying a corrective to popular
opinion, but Mill argued – and Milton would agree – that if folk aren’t
exposed to ideas contrary to their own, “they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for
truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer
perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with
error.” Whether or not Mill would on this principle read an essay praising the
consummate artistry of Miley Cyrus, I do not know. But I think he would concede
the wisdom of its existence. Returning to the real world, rejecting popular
opinion can catch eyeballs, though you need to argue well if you hope to build “brand.”
53) To what degree does one plan a review? I don't mean structure as one writes but anticipation as one encounters the thing to be reviewed. Certainly experience and knowledge of the art form tell us that certain things must be scrutinized. But to what degree do we strive for the so-called "open mind," ready to engage on some element of the thing that we did not anticipate. Obviously, we have a checklist at the back of our minds as we review. I assume if we review often enough, we develop a kind of "muscle memory" of what matters - there are elements of the experience we can't NOT see. But are we capable of keeping the checklist at the back of our minds rather than the front. Are we open to the thing in personal, even eccentric ways, acknowledging that every "read" of an art object is personal. How does it make us "new," if I may get richly vague.
54) "In the first place, as we all know and as Nabokov on numerous occasions was pleased to remind us, art is at bottom an elaborate con game, but one whose techniques are designed to lead us by degrees into a realm of authentic emotion and aesthetic bliss, which justifies the con."
55) Rebecca Solnit - "I just made humorous remarks about some books and some dead writers’ characters. These guys were apparently so upset and so convinced that the existence of my opinions and voice menaced others’ rights. Guys: censorship is when the authorities repress a work of art, not when someone dislikes it.
"I had never said that we shouldn’t read Lolita. I’ve read it more than once. I joked that there should be a list of books no woman should read, because quite a few lionized books are rather nasty about my gender, but I’d also said “of course I believe everyone should read anything they want. I just think some books are instructions on why women are dirt or hardly exist at all except as accessories or are inherently evil and empty.” And then I’d had fun throwing out some opinions about books and writers. But I was serious about this. You read enough books in which people like you are disposable, or are dirt, or are silent, absent, or worthless, and it makes an impact on you. Because art makes the world, because it matters, because it makes us. Or breaks us."