The Archives
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11.02.09The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work... they seem to have no desire to undertake the kind of work which makes any claim to leave a lasting legacy. They have the inner freedom to exercise their intelligence in the way that taxi drivers will practise their navigational skills: they will go wherever their client directs them to. ... They have no ambition to become known to strangers or to record their insights for an unimpressed and ephemeral future. They are well-adjusted enough to have made their peace with oblivion. They have accepted with grace the paucity of opportunities for immortality in audit. The Pleasures ...
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07.02.09partisan reviewsL'affaire de Botton, in which a bad review prompted some outrage on the part of Alain de Botton and some thinking about the ethics of the book review, led me to look again at John Updike's rules for reviewers. And while I think Updike's rules set the standard for the kind of book review done in the New York Times and most of the remaining newspaper book pages, they really only cover a particular genre of writing about books. There are other types of book essay, where these rules aren't entirely applicable, and would in fact be an ...
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06.30.09rules and contracts: reviewers, writers, and readersAs a way out of the morass of hurt feelings, embarrassing outbursts, and grand posturing in the recent reviewer-writer donnybrooks, take a look at what John Updike had to say in his six rules for book reviews. "[S]haped intaglio-fashion by youthful traumas at the receiving end of critical opinion," they lay out a guide for civil, ethical, and useful criticism. They insist first on fairness: "do not blame [the author] for not achieving what he did not attempt." It would be unfair, for example, to criticize a pulp science fiction novel for failing to offer well-rounded characters, just as ...
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06.29.09the pleasures and sorrows of reviewsHot on the heels of Alice Hoffman's very public tantrum, another writer pops up to confront a reviewer. Is it time, perhaps, to mount the barricades? I hadn't heard the call to revolution, but if I must dig up cobblestones, then so be it: Sous les pavés la plage! This time, it's Alain de Botton responding to Caleb Crain's NY Times review of The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work over at Crain's Steamboats Are Ruining Everything site. In de Botton's defense, Crain's review really is negative (unlike Roberta Silman's review of Alice Hoffman's novel, which was much more mixed). ...
