proximoception: (Default)
proximoception ([personal profile] proximoception) wrote2006-04-29 03:44 am

(no subject)

This James Wood sure is a bitchy little fellow. Born magazine writer, too.

[identity profile] proximoception.livejournal.com 2006-05-02 01:15 am (UTC)(link)
I was actually less offended by the Bloom hatchet-job because he clearly doesn't understand him (perhaps deliberately, there's a whiff of patricidal rage there). The Cormac McCarthy one was just gross, though. This man seems to read looking for what might be wrong with a book, and that isn't reading.

[identity profile] paris-hat.livejournal.com 2006-05-02 04:05 am (UTC)(link)
He could learn a thing or two from Michael Dirda. Or Helen Vendler.

You mean the review from the summer, of NCFOM, right?

[identity profile] proximoception.livejournal.com 2006-05-02 10:18 am (UTC)(link)
Yeah, that one. He accuses McCarthy of pretentiousness, among other things. This from someone whose every word, every ill-dropped name, every outlandish metaphor is pitched to convey smug omniscience and superiority to his reviewees.

Not that it's a stance he invented, that or the singsong Euphuistic "here's what may be a fault, here's what may be a virtue, here's the fault recapped but moderated and this time I'm sure of it" Time magazine paragraph logic he never deviates from. But people have a choice of becoming telemarketers, car salespeople, things like that. And nice ones don't.