I felt stuck in my own subjectivity, unable to ascend to empyrean heights of critical authority.
I tried to hold still and focused on remembering to scribble my notes. This was before the internet; my reviews were built on whatever I walked out of the theater with. The fact was, I had to tank up on quite a bit of coffee to do my job. Though I had what is pretty much the textbook definition of …
That’s how the stain works. The biography colors the song, which colors the sunny moment of the diner. We don’t decide that coloration is going to happen. We don’t get to make decisions about the stain. It’s already too late. It touches everything. Our understanding of the work has taken on a new c…
it’s Annie’s nonsensical, almost nonverbal weltanschauung that lifts the movie into flight
But hold up for a minute: who is this “we” that’s always turning up in critical writing? We is an escape hatch. We is cheap. We is a way of simultaneously sloughing off personal responsibility and taking on the mantle of easy authority. It’s the voice of the middlebrow male critic, the one who trul…
