OK, so this has been building up for a while; and rather than lurking around all snippy and defensive in the Comments section, really I need to mount a more thoughtful, and measured, response to this whole topic. And the topic, of course, is the charge that I “over-analyze” things. I’d like to begin by [...]
Five more kvetches about Kakutani’s style of literary criticism and we’re done, boys & girls. Hold on tight. The first I sort of mentioned in the very first post, and it’s implicit in much of what I’ve written already: to wit, she (#6) too much enjoys delivering the jeremiad. As Neil Innes sings in his [...]
Having had some time to simmer down a bit, I’m a lot less hot under the collar about Michiko Kakutani’s “Texts Without Context” than I was last week. I still think it’s riddled with deplorably sloppy thinking; and in that, I still think it’s entirely characteristic of her work as a critic. But there are [...]
Ah, the joys of serial writing! In yesterday’s post, I referred to the title of Michiko Kakutani’s recent NYTimes essay incorrectly—not once, but four times. (Don’t bother to look back: I’ve “silently amended” the error.) I’d credited her with writing “Texts without Contexts”; the actual title of the essay uses the singular “context.” Now to [...]
I’ve realized recently that I can be something of a reactionary against “reactionaries.” I suppose I’m a left-reactionary, though reactionary against both right- and left-reactionaries. Quite a “meta-” situation, to be sure: precisely the kind of thing Michiko Kakutani loathes. As many of my readers will be aware, Kakutani has been at it again; her [...]