First
Typing the word crisis in any post that isnβt about e.g. nuclear armament or ICE makes me grimace. If you are reading this, read this too.
Okay
Hello and welcome to PART TWO of this series, in which I reverse-engineer my own writing to REVEAL my beliefs and assumptions about CRITICISM. It is a back-to-elementals exercise to find out where my ideas came from and whether they hold up.
Recently Iβve read several useful conversations about criticism and its functions, plus there are many types of critical writing proliferating on Substack, as well as new magazines entirely dedicated to reforming or reinvigorating criticism (agenda pls?!), all of which made me want to assess what I take for granted.
A lot of the current discourse is based on the idea that there is a Crisis Afoot. There are some things that make criticism in this era unique(ly fucked), but many aspects of publishing have always been in βcrisis,β making this not a crisis but an intrinsic condition that we rely on to stay hyped. My conclusion from PART ONE is that if there is a crisis, itβs a labor crisis.
In PART ONE I talked about my philosophy of book reviews: the good, the bad, and the pan. I tried to articulate what I think it means to be a good faith β not positive β reviewer.
For PART TWO I am going to deal with my confusion about the idea that writing novels and writing criticism would be mutually exclusive β or that writing anything and anything else would be mutually exclusive. As you read this sentence, I am setting up a straw person who staunchly believes this, in order to argue against it. To get to the Don Quixote battle we will have to take a detour through My Life Story. Join me.
How it started, how itβs going
Over 15 years Iβve written at least 50 reviews. I didnβt mean to become a critic, although it was probably obvious that I would end up this way bc I am overflowing with critical opinions. I started in art, veered into architecture, stopped for a roadside snack in media theory, careened into literature, and now Iβm just out here pantheistically critiquing. While this may have led me to a master-of-none situation, it also gives me a comparative perspective on the peculiarities and implicit rules of different realms of aesthetic/cultural production.
Rewind to the 2000s: I thought I was going to be a poet (fr), but halfway through college I decided to be an artist for [redacted] reasons. I mostly built big sculptures out of wood and drywall with holes in them that were about hiding and sometimes I actually hid inside them and that was part of the art. In 2010 after graduating I went on an outsider art road trip and then moved to Berlin, where I got a babysitting job, a restaurant job, and a gallery internship, and I rented a studio so I could go ahead and be an artist.
