Exquisitely Mean

‘I do not mean to say that Moody is racist, sexist, or homophobic. I mean to say only that he is a bad writer. But bad writing has consequences. The Black Veil isn’t simply a bad idea badly rendered. It is so awful that it is easy to see the book as in league with the very crimes that it seeks to redress.’

Yeah, The Black Veil was a great one for nasty reviews.

Argh. That review was by Matt Zoller Zeitz. So much for credit where due.

I disagree with #6. To truly understand a work of art, particularly to understand your own reactions to said work, requires reacting to an antithetical view. Oh dear, I’ve become Hegelian. Nevertheless, I feel that by reading Larkin’s take on Miles and ‘Trane, one can clearly see how different his/her own feelings are. The more strongly the contrary opinion is offered, the more powerful the synthesis of understanding.

Larkin’s reviews were about as witty as a sour old fart. The idea of a “proper jazz solo” is just crusty stupidity.

The middle-aged Larkin continued to love the jazz he’d learned to love as a young man, the vintage jazz of Armstrong and Bechet and company. He wrote about it and its world with great skill, affection, longing. He disliked the modernism of Parker (and Pound and Picasso) and explained why. Much of the pleasure of reading him comes from the contrast between the unaffected joy he takes in the music of the old boys and the vigour and skill with which he described his disappointment with their successors. To call him a soulless turd is wide of the mark: his taste may differ from yours – you too are allowed to explain, if you can, why you like what you like, dislike what you dislike. Insulting someone for not sharing your taste is rather puerile.

I love Coltrane but I can’t agree with Iron Lungfish that Larkin is “soulless” merely because Larkin doesn’t share my attitude. I found the quoted review quite entertaining and provocative. Even soulful. In any case, good ridicule can be a worthy art in itself.

Oh, and another candidate left out of that competition: Mark Twain’s classic reviews of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales.

iron lungfish: The winner of the contest is the Burnyeat review of a Leo Strauss book, and it’s not “bile” at all. It’s a good, biting review that makes a damn good case that Strauss is a bit of a nutter.

Ugh, Lewis Lapham. There’s someone who could use a good enfilading himself.

“Cargo cult,” like “there’s no there there” and “jumped the shark,” is one of those canned phrases that’s merely unimaginative when used normally but really unbearably pompous when the writer feels the need to explain it, as if it were a metaphor he’d just thought of that his readers won’t necessarily get.

Spy Magazine’s “review of reviewers” did a gorgeous number on him back in the day, which IIRC summed up by saying “Lapham is the sort of person one wishes the Soviets had designed a special nuclear missile for” (it was the 80s); doesn’t seem to exist online, unfortunately.

Larkin, based on this snippet, is okay.

For a jazz critic, I hear he was also fair shakes as a poet.

Terry Eagleton had some choice bits in his review of Gayatri Spivak’s Critique of Postcolonial Reason.

Here’s a bin of mean to sort through.

“describing [Eagleton] as “the author of a Ladybird primer in critical theory.””

Sounds apt, but he’s still mean and witty.

Do we include all reviews in The New Criterion of art produced after 1900?

Best way to write evil reviews: possess or adopt the opposite political persuasion, so that you neither understand nor sympathize with the artist’s or author’s intentions (this also can be done from the left, e.g. the attack on Leo Strauss cited above). This also enables you to write the review quickly, as entertainment.

In a word, the New York Times Book Review section (all too often). The reviewers are under time pressure, and must amuse the hungover or caffeine-distracted Sunday morning reader.

What Larkin seems to be saying is that (unknown even to himself) he doesn’t like music very much but is more than enthusiastic about some sorts of sentiment or nostalgia. In the example cited he doesn’t really say anything at all about anyone but himself. There is a grain of truth in what one can see about that.

Dang, I tend to regard A Love Supreme lightly (while stile loving it) because it’s so popular and approachable. Pop Coltrane.

Om. Oooooom. OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

When it comes to film, I think Anthony Lane’s reviews for the New Yorker would be the best place to look for contenders. “Meet Joe Black” (the Brad Pitt version) certainly fails the worthy target requirement, but it’s a great example otherwise:

“There are many unanswered questions here (why, for instance, does Pitt’s Grim Reaper seem semi-retarded?)…”

and

“Meet Joe Black is over three hours long. But to be fair, it doesn’t matter how long a movie is, it only matters how long it feels. Meet Joe Black feels like 15 hours.”

Dolan is good. So is Terry Eagleton (as you can see on his essay on Stanley Fish.) I also appreciate some of Bob Blacks’s work:

Altough he has placed his gift to the world on-line, Balash has yet to activate a standard feature of the PC, the spell-checker. It’s true that the spell-checker cannot be counted on to correct misspellings of proper names like Germain Greer, Mann Ray, Eugene O’Neil, and Foucalt, among other of his blunders. But it should signal possible problems with “financil,” “propogates,” “homogenous,” “juvenelia” and “subli” – mine is screaming at me right now. I feel its pain. Although I have taught writing several times, I’m an amateur as a writer as well as a teacher, and I don’t know the names of all of Balash’s mistakes. I don’t know what to call it when he starts a sentence by saying, “The adult consumer . . . is able to procure for she and her family,” or “They’re losses should be” something or another. Balash routinely inserts apostrophes where they do not belong and omits them where they do. He also makes just plain dumb vocabulary blunders, as when he refers to “these basic tenants of McAnarchism egoism,” as if egoism was a landlord. The spell-checker is no substitute for a good grade-school education. And – by Bakunin’s balls! – what the hell is a “specious gaze”?

The latter may not count, as it is a counter-attack by one anarchist of some notoriety on another of no fame at all. In other words, it is not a “worthy target”.

Larkin’s comments on Davis and Coltrane have a larger context. He thought the greatest art has to appeal both to the emotions and to the intellect (as his own poetry so brilliantly does); in music that means combining beat and brains. The jazz of Armstrong and Bechet did that, but post-Parker jazz was purely cerebral. More generally, Larkin thought music in the later 20th century divided into brains without beat (post-Parker jazz) and beat without brains (rock ‘n’ roll). More generally still, he saw all modernist art — Picasso, Pound, etc. — as directly purely to the intellect and therefore unsatisfying. Agree or not –maybe you like purely cerebral works — it’s a brilliant analysis of a distinctive feature of 20th-century art, across the genres, and you have to see it behind the specific comments on Davis and Coltrane.

As for the Burnyeat review, isn’t it taking a sledgehammer to crush a flea? Robert Nozick put it much more pithily: Straussians are people who believe that the sum total of political wisdom is that only the wise should rule. Ouch!

It’s hard to believe that any discussion of vicious book reviews has made it this far without even mentioning Dorothy Parker. I don’t know which of hers I’d put up (maybe “Tonstant Weader Fwowed Up”), but she should certainly be in there.

Speaking of Gingrich, the best filleting of his intellectual dilletantism I’ve ever read — and which, if you stretched the definition, could be called a review essay — is Joan Didion’s “Newt Gingrich, Superstar”, which is reprinted in her book Political Fictions.

As for Peck, I rolled my eyes and ignored the squalls which passed through the chattering classes when the infamous Rick Moody review was published, and gritted my teeth and reached for the gin when it was all repeated on the publication of Hatchet Jobs, so I freely confess to a distorted perspective, but it seems to me that he’s now retreated so far up his own arse, transforming his attitude to all fiction into that of a petulant, nihilistic child (see here for a timely example), that his entire critical oeuvre has been retroactively discredited.

whoops, the last comment beat me to it. Well, then, I’ll offer Dear Doctor, I Read Your Play (Byron), which, the legend goes, was Byron’s suggestion for a rejection letter to his publisher.

Or, for that matter, the entire dedication of Byron’s Don Juan, which tears holes in pretty much all of his contemporaries, and BRUTALIZES Southey.

De gustibus non est disputandum, but I can’t imagine a less apt description of Miles and Trane than “purely cerebral,” unless it refers to the very late Coltrane works like Ascension.

Other than those few exceptions, their discographies have probably the most intense emotional resonance I’ve ever experienced in music. Especially Coltrane whose work is, to many fans, best known for how it evokes and embodies his lifelong quest for a deeper spirituality.

Also, conveying emotion via music involves the melody and harmony at least as much as the beat.. but Miles and Trane usually had plenty of swing going on regardless, no less than Duke to my ears.

I’m just thankful Larkin never got around to opining on hip-hop.

Lee Siegel’s Nation review of the latest Camille Paglia book was pretty mean.

I’m partial to Red Mike, aka Jim Macdonald, and particularly his review of the movie of Starship Troopers.

Many of Roger Ebert’s 0 Stars reviews are also good. I realize these are a bit downmarket compared to some of the other suggestions. (Find Ebert’s by going here, and plugging in “zero” and “zero” into “from” and “to” in the stars pull-down.)

wcw, maybe you would enjoy Evan Parker’s solo soprano saxophone recordings? They often sound like several saxophones being played at once, or a few hundred played at once. If asked for a record akin to the dog-with-100-legs picture, that’d definitely be my pick.

Ditto to Jay Smooth about “purely cerebral,” except I also find it an incredibly inapt description of Ascension. “So intense it’s hard to take” is what I’d say.

Oh, and Kael on The Sound of Music and Hiroshima Mon Amour. When I watched the latter after reading the review, I honestly felt like I might have kinda enjoyed it had I not previously read that review.