A Plea and an Apology

A note: I read this article, went crazy, and started writing this blog, which I've now been trying to get right for weeks now. And I'm still not sure if I've made my point, but here it is anyway ...

I subscribe to both McSweeney’s Quarterly and The Believer, which are literary magaizines both published by McSweeney’s. I find McSweeney’s Quarterly sometimes brilliant if always wearily elitist. I find The Believer to be only occasionally elitist and the rest of the time almost pathetically insecure. The founding idea of The Believer was to eliminate “snarkiness” in criticism, which I think is a very valid goal, except that they go about it ridiculously by abolishing all negative criticism, which is so juvenile and pathetic that it’s pitiable. Part of consuming art is being disappointed. Sometimes people write bad books and sometimes we read them. It can be valuable to talk about why something is bad – at the same time there is utterly no value in mocking something bad merely for the sake of putting it down.

It’s not that sarcasm and withering criticism doesn’t have a place – goodness knows I’m sarcastic enough myself. And no doubt part of the reason I despise it so much is that I am myself guilty. But moderation is required with sarcasm. You can’t just be sarcastic about everything.

On the other hand, there are critics and others who take a passion for sincerity so far that they, too, seem ridiculous. I admire feeling passionate about things, as you know there are musical artists and movies and books that I have an incredible passion for. But to retreat totally into that world would be sad.

Often, these flaws exist within the same person – and new pop culture is almost always the victim. Recent movies get snipped at, new songs mocked – and a critic will lament for the “good old days” of this or that art form. But as surely as I now love the Ghostbusters movies of the 80’s, I know there were people then who must have mocked the fad to no end. I wonder how many of those people now own the DVDs? By the same token, there will be movies released this summer that are loved fanatically 20 years from now, no doubt by some people who excoriate them for fun and profit today.

Again, I know I’m sometimes guilty. I just feel very tired of cruelty and negativity without purpose. Sure, I was pretty mean in my review a few months ago of the latest Tom Wolfe book. But I also tried to take the time to explain what I hated about it – and what made parts of it good enough that I read the whole thing anyway. There’s a lot of bad art that gets made, and it’s important to be aware that not everything is good just because it exists. But mocking something bad tells us nothing about how to be better.

[/off soapbox]