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Absorbancy

March 19, 2010 in the literary conversation

Sorry for the vast, numbing silence here.

I came across a post this post by David Bordwell about the merits and feasibility of film criticism (via Andrew Seal on Google Reader), and this quote leapt out at me:

Forget about becoming a film critic. Become an intellectual, a person to whom ideas matter. Read in history, science, politics, and the arts generally. Develop your own ideas, and see what sparks they strike in relation to films.

The same certainly applies to the best book critics. I admire The New York Review of Book‘s much-delayed book reviews because they’re always written with a wide lens, one that scoops relevant comparisons in art, film, history, and modern politics.

It’s terribly difficult to write reviews like that—much easier to simply discuss the book at hand in a hermetic (lol, nearly wrote hermeneutic and had to look it up in the dictionary) analytical bubble.

And here’s where I justify my blog silence by reassuring you that I’m reading too widely to comment on what I’m reading.

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