Tag Archives: guest essay

Dyspeptic Ouroborus: What am I doing? What are you doing?

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I was wondering about what people do when they practice criticism. Everyone here writes out their thoughts about comics, movies, music, etc. What are you doing when you do that?

What I do is to feel my way. Whatever I’m writing about, I want to write about it as if I had never seen the thing before. What is this thing you call “comic”? How could it ever have come to be? Why do people keep it in existence? And how did this particular example of “comic,” the one I’m holding, fluke into being? What can we tell about ourselves from its existence?

I guess at answers by keeping my eyes open and noticing everything (trying to, I mean), and I refine my guesses by comparing them with what I know of the world, including the people and industry that produced the item in question (the comic, movie, or whatever).

So I start out pretending to know nothing, then I pull in what I know or think I know. It’s quite a change of gears, and in either case it’s like I have to take myself by surprise, ambush my perceptions from a direction I don’t expect.

Always getting blindsided and feeling like a dope can get your adrenaline up, even if you’re just typing your thoughts about Civil War. But it can also leave you ragged. The “ah ha” moment come by often enough to keep you playing, but most often it’s like you’re trying to find your cold medicine in an ocean liner and the lights have gone out and the damn floor keeps moving.

Possibly somebody else might follow the same approach that I do, the same “dream it up/check it out” two-step, and that person might not feel at all stupid. Instead of “Everything I know is useless,” the person might think “I see the universe in a plum!” Instead of “I can’t possibly be right,” he’d think, “My flashes of perception are transformed and broadened by my sure knowledge of the world.” Which makes that hypothetical second person sound like a fatuous ass, but whatever. You don’t have to suffer to do good work.

And it’s very likely that other people follow quite a different method. The thing is, I don’t know anything at all about how other people write criticism. I’ve never studied the subject and never thought about it, beyond noticing that critics I like don’t necessarily supply opinions I agree with. (For instance, Pauline Kael and Citizen Kane’s alleged “dime-store Freud.”)

Anyway, how other people write criticism. It involves theory, right? As indicated above, I proceed by sensibility and fact-checking. My ideology (which I won’t try to define) is always there, but it sneaks in. I never feel oriented, never proceed from an overview, and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to.

Dyspeptic Ouroboros: Alyssa Rosenberg on Pop Culture and Criticism

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Alyssa Rosenberg writes on pop culture for the Atlantic and at her own blog. We met a while back when she wrote an article on Twilight, to which I responded snarkily, and she responded to my response with much good grace. After that auspicious start, I asked her if she’d be willing to talk about criticism and art for this blog. In response she wrote the essay below.

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When I was in middle school, a prescient friend bought me Isaac Asimov’s Magic, a collection of the science-fiction author’s fantasy writing and essays. Some of that book’s lessons, have lasted with me for more than a decade: Overindustrialization is Mordor. Writing aliens is pretty hard. And perhaps I should have absorbed a third, delivered in the short story “The Critic on the Hearth”: “I have two of my own comments. The first is that every critic ought to become a garbage collector. He will be doing more useful work and he will have a higher social position. The second is that every critic ought to be thrown into the fireplace.”

But by the time I got to Magic, it was already too late. My first career as a pint-sized critic was already behind me–and unbeknownst to me, one of my future paths had been set.

To fill lingering hours after elementary school during a four-year stopover in Middlebury, Vt., my mother had convinced an editor at our local newspaper to give me space on the children’s page to write about books. The criticism, such as it was, that appeared next to a school picture of me in round glasses and a dress with an equally round lace collar wasn’t exactly sophisticated. At eight years old, I wasn’t up to doing much more than picking books that had something in common and explaining that I liked them. Or not.

The column ended when we moved away, and high school and college brought pleasures other than criticism: insanely competitive debate programs, hard-fought municipal elections, the ability to drink legally, writing classes, boys. Each time I felt as if I’d found the Next Thing. With the perpetual certainty of youth, I was alternately sure I was going to be the best high school debater ever, an activist professor, a local political fixer. There were a lot of possibilities that felt more important than journalism, much less something like writing about YA literature. And yet, by my senior year in college, I found myself sending off dozens of applications for journalism and publishing jobs, ending up at National Journal, a respectable and deadly-serious Washington, DC political weekly.

It wasn’t necessarily the platform from which to get back to criticism. But I arrived in Washington in a season when a thousand blogs weren’t just blooming, they were being transplanted into some of the best journalistic greenhouses in the city. And after several years at National Journal and then at Government Executive, a magazine for civil servants, I looked not to political bloggers, but to my eight-year-old self when I decided to start writing on the side and for fun, and wanted to find a meaningful subject. And after watching policy bloggers slug it out against the backdrop of an oft-deadlocked Congress, pop culture seemed more valuable than it had before, as both an escape, and as a field of play. I’ve become a somewhat more sophisticated consumer and observer of media in the last decade and a half. I can explain why I like or don’t like things now. But I’ve also found myself interested in a larger question: what does what we like say about us?

Noah and I met, in fact, because of a disagreement over what the Twilight phenomenon means for discussions about sexuality and gender. We never reached agreement on the merits, but it was clear we were working under the common assumption that culture, particularly popular culture, is a place where both creators and consumers work out real-life issues ranging from deciding whether to have sex before marriage to what would happen in a world with extremely large, well-equipped private armies.

Doing this kind of criticism doesn’t necessarily mean being deadly serious about things that are, after all, a lot of fun. Sometimes a Robyn song is just a Robyn song. But sometimes it’s also an argument for female artists about going independent rather than relying on and being shaped by a major label, just as the pop-rap fusions in collaborations between artists like Kanye West and Keri Hilson or B.o.B. and Janelle Monae are evidence for rap’s conquest and colonization of popular music. The Iron Man movies are fun because Robert Downey, Jr. is relaxed and having a great time playing a roguish industrialist, but they’re also action movies for people who feel ambivalent about the projection of American military power–even if it means they’re settling for an individual having tremendous power, fire- and otherwise, because he’s charming. Unlike in politics, in pop culture the choices don’t always have to be clear. Artists are blessedly free to explore gray areas without risking the career suicide that so often accompanies the impression that a government leader possesses less than crystalline moral clarity.

All pop culture might have larger implications, but that doesn’t mean that pop culture is weighed down or overwhelmed by its larger significance. That means that lots of Americans can murder prostitutes in video game worlds without feeling bad about it, but also that they can absorb relevant lessons about respecting the elderly along with a bunch of jokes about talking dogs. Critics are the people who can live in those tensions and contradictions, who interpret and clarify the meaning in jewels and in junk. Maybe for happily residing in the midst of those fractures, for seeing the value in a movie that involves a little girl beaten up, or a cowardly loan officer dragged to the netherworld by a demon, for balancing difficult aesthetic and political judgements, we still ought to be roasted. But I think in a world where culture has such freighted implications, there’s room for critics along with the garbage collectors.
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Many thanks to Alyssa for her guest post. Please visit her blog if you get the change; she writes on comics, hip hop, television, movies, and lots more.