The Social Ramifications of Media Criticism
Shortly before Birdman won best picture, I was ranting on Facebook about how I find the films of Alejandro Inarritu to be pretentious and self-serious. I also used the word bloviated.
This provoked some ire amongst my friendly acquaintances, and some playful verbal fencing online. A couple of wasted hours later a notification pops up that Scott (not his real name) has commented on my post. Scott doesn’t comment on my posts very often, so I am intrigued. On my anti-Inarritu thread, Scott posted a pithy and perhaps petty short sentence that took me to task for epitomizing all the same qualities that I was criticizing. “Sounds like you’re the self-serious pretentious bloviator,” he wrote. Which was painful, a little, partially because it came from someone who I don’t have that sort of shit-flipping, or piss-taking, relationship with, and also because it seemed like a personal attack, less in jest and more in anger or righteousness, seemed to imply that I had no right to speak at all. It was also true, in a way. But since my father just shy of literally beat into me the motto and practice of “don’t dish it out if you can’t take it,” I was pretty sure I could take it, even if it stung.
After a somewhat tense back and forth between us, which began by me typing in response “Hey Scott, takes one to know one,” just to prove that I was equally as childish as I was pretentious, and we went back and forth a bit doubling down on our points before Scott ended the exchange with a sort of apology/explanation saying that Scott didn’t mean to lash out at me personally and was just frustrated that Facebook gives any idiot a platform to publish their uninformed views about the work of real artists. Because I know Scott well enough in real life, and know that Scott is way more pretentious than I’ll ever be, I also didn’t take offense at this comment either, even though, in summary, what Scott was saying was I was an ignoramus and had no right to speak ill of people Scott deems as non-ignoramuses. Even though in doing this, Scott seemed to be trying to shut down the discussion rather than participate in an open, if harsh, exchange of ideas. Scott did succeed in getting me to rethink the value of the discussion I was having. I began to wonder, as I have many times before, not so much if I had the right to be snarky, but why I take such pleasure in trashing things. And is there really any value in this kind of behavior?
I have a love/hate relationship with Facebook, as so many of us do. The more I actively use it, and by use I mean post and comment and not just read the endless feed, the more I enjoy it. But the more I enjoy it the more I use it and the more time it takes away from the rest of my life. Since I primarily access it through my Iphone, Facebook is always in my pocket and always available for distraction. I log out from time to time, or I deactivate it, when I need to get things done.
One Sunday morning when I was having a hard time motivating myself to get an assignment done for grad school (I was in an MFA program, studying creative writing) I made the mistake of logging back in. Scrolling down a bit I found a lengthy intro to a much-linked article in the Seattle alternative weekly The Stranger. The article, by Ryan Boudinot, was titled: “Things I Can Say About MFA Writing Programs Now That I No Longer Teach in One.” It lists a lot of tropes about how writers are either born eloquent or not, most wannabe writers suck, memoirists suck, if you can’t finish Gravity’s Jest or Infinite Rainbow you suck, etc… And so unsurprisingly, there were over 100 very angry rebuttals of his article, including some from his former students, on The Stranger’s website. On Facebook, my former MFA advisor took Boudinot to task for his carelessness and callousness and argued passionately that writing could be taught, and that it was not the hotshot, born-gifted writers that broke into the publishing world, but instead the steady-eddies, the slow and unflashy tortoises of writing workshops, that find success. Because, my advisor said, writing is so much less about talent and more about enduring—criticism, rejection, and draft after draft after draft—which means big ego’s often flame out in the process of trying to become gainfully published, either from too much rejection or too little patience.
I am not really bothered by much of what Boudinot had to say. The truth is that it is next to impossible to make a living in any art form- music, art, film, dance, writing, etc… Too many people want to do it and too many folks are willing to give their work away for free. While the demand for popular art has never been higher, the internet, as primary distribution device for disseminating art to the masses, has negated any barriers to the production costs of the ever increasing supply. We all kinda wanna be artists now and we all kinda can be. Most of us just aren’t very good at it. In that sense those of us who want to foolishly shell out 40 grand to get an MFA should be lauded for having the sense to want to improve our craft before inflicting our art on the uninterested world. I’d think Boudinot could get behind that. The reality of studying fine art at the graduate level is that it is so very unlikely you will make a living at it—and so expensive to study it, especially at the unfunded low residency programs, like the one I was enrolled in, and loved, FYI—that it hardly seems like a revelation that most of his students will never make it. What I have been so surprised to find is that so many of the folks I have met in my MFA program don’t seem to care. They are happy if they are published anywhere, regardless if the publication pays, or if they have to pay the publication, or if anyone outside of the MFA program has heard of the Crab Scratch Review (or any other of the thousands of obscure literary journals). Many of my fellow students are surprisingly excited to go and use their degrees to make very little money teaching freshman comp at the smallest of community colleges. And even though a few of my fellow students are exactly the type of students that Boudinot is shitting on in his rant, they don’t believe a word he has to say about them. “You don’t have to read Infinite Jest if you write genre fiction!” wrote some of the online commenters, most of whom had MFAs. “I started writing at 40 and I have already been published twice, take that Boudinot!” “Glad I wasn’t his student,” others posted.
What Boudinot didn’t say, as n+1 magazine did in it’s collection MFA vs. NYC, is that creative writing MFA programs are, by and large, a growing pyramid scheme that grooms students not to be published writers but instead writing teachers in one of the rapidly increasing number of new MFA programs opening around the country. There is not a paying market for well-crafted short stories, but there is plenty of student loan money available to pay professors to teach students how to write well-crafted short stories. Tellingly, Boudinot didn’t have any tough love to dispense for his fellow teachers, who, like him, were in on the scam. The one’s who were all presumably paid well (but perhaps not quite well enough: not engineer level pay, or nurse pay, and less than most kindergarten teachers are paid, definitely not what they probably think they deserve to be paid, being professional writers and all) to babysit all these nitwits who foolishly think they are the next George Saunders or Cheryl Strayed. Boudinot is silent on the subject of his colleague’s merits and or faults, or the morality of the institutional MFAs fleecing all these supposed nitwit wannabe writers to begin with. Why you wanna blame the victim, Boudinot?
But my guess is that Boudinot was burned out on teaching and bitter and frustrated about his own lack of success, or on the toll teaching writing took on his own capacity to write. He probably wanted to settle some scores on his way out the door and he knew that an article dissing MFAs would surely be clickbait in the very small lit community. The article ended up providing him more attention, on a national scale, than anything else he’s ever written. He said fuck you to the man, he gored a sacred cow, and he got momentarily famous for it. He seemed to revel in it at first. I was envious!
I am a big fan of the fuck you in print. Even though I think Boudinot made a bad call in publishing his rant—for 3 reasons: first- he is the head of a non-profit looking to establish Seattle as one of the world’s very few designated Literary Cities; secondly he is not the world’s, or even Seattle’s most successful author, he’s not even in the city’s top 10, and it’s not very classy for a writer of not much regard or success to be trashing on his students for their own lack of ability to make it; and lastly, teaching pays better than low book sales, and I, and other internet commenters, surmise that Mr. Boudinot will eventually be forced to crawl back to another teaching position. Still, I applaud his willingness to expose his own biases. I applaud his willingness, in airing these opinions publicly, to be held accountable for his beliefs, and as has been made obvious, to be willing to start the dialogue and to dare to be told that he is wrong.
My first reaction to reading Boudinot’s rant was that I was glad I didn’t write it, because there’s a number of things he said that I have said, that my friends in the program have said, in private. But we are students. There’s less of a power imbalance in students mocking their peers, almost none in students mocking their instructors, or the institution, especially when behind their collective backs.
My second reaction was: does the world really need shit like this: click-bait rants about MFA programs specifically, or snarky literary criticism in general? Are the “Life like Water” quoting, post-ironists, the “no-negative-book-reviews” of the new Buzzfeed Books section, correct? Is there really no point in going negative anymore? At least when it comes to Art?
Lee Siegel, a repentant former literary hatchet man/book reviewer for the New Republic, Harper’s and other publications, seems to think so. In his 2013 New Yorker think piece “Burying the Hatchet” he briefly pines for the good old days of US negative book reviewing, mostly the 1950s and 60s, before launching into his well reasoned argument for why he can no longer bring himself to gleefully trash his fellow writers, artists, creatives, etc… Siegel references the French sociologist Comte, says we are living in a “critical age, liberating and discombobulating, where everything is allowed but nothing is permitted to take root in a deep or lasting way.” Which in the age of internet, seems true, though there are certainly exceptions, television being perhaps the most obvious, where the mass binge watching of largely adult, slightly edgy new programming is accreting the kind of lasting cross-party bonding that no politician could ever dream of inspiring. Who doesn’t love Breaking Bad? (I don’t, unsurprisingly, but I seem to be utterly alone in this). How deeply has that show embedded itself in the national discourse? It’s had as much impact as Seinfeld, or the Cosby Show. But in books and music, yes, Siegel and Comte are generally right: discombobulation. So how does the moral, art loving (we only criticize what we love, right? The passion of the attack is in proportion to the passion for the art form…) critic practice his or her craft in this critical age? According to Seigel, and to BuzzFeed, and just about any mainstream media outlet, as most of them have completely forgone the negative review, “the most effective criticism of what, in the critic’s eyes, is a bad book would be to simply ignore it.”
This is true, I suppose, for up and coming or under-known authors an artists, who if ignored will simply sink back into the cultural miasma, and who if attacked, may even perversely benefit from the attack, or worse be harmed only for the sin of being new to their craft, but my objection to Siegel’s capitulation is that so much mediocrity is hyped continuously and or foisted upon us with increasingly less discourse as to whether it’s good or not.
Bret Easton Ellis is not ok with the current state of our art. Or cinema, mostly. And he is not ok with everyone else wanting to be ok with everything. The former author/provacateur and current LA-based screenwriter has a podcast now, on which he ostensibly interviews artists he is interested in but mostly talks at them and mostly laments the state of film in America. Sounds annoying right? But unlike so many celebrity chat shows, Ellis challenges his mostly celebrity guests—if not by directly criticizing the works of his guests, he creates a space where it is acceptable to share strong opinions by stating his own nakedly and boldly in the show’s opening monologue. I don’t agree with everything he says, but I appreciate his courage to say it. And yes I do mean courage. “Shit-talking” may not sound courageous in concept, but the way Ellis does it, the way I hope I do it, and even the way Boudinot kind of did it, is less about denigration and more about trying to understand why we love what we love. This may sound perverse, practicing hate as an expression of love, but hear me out.
The opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is indifference. To hate is to feel- strongly, passionately, in perhaps a destructive manner, but hate is feeling nonetheless. Indifference is the absence of feeling. Indifference is being ok with everything, because you just don’t care all that much. There are many occasions where cultivated indifference is a laudable asset, where it is better to be open and accepting and nonjudgemental. But too many people in power rely on the virtues of polite society to get away with a lot of bad and stupid shit. And the corporate media masters certainly benefit from a world where we all consume noiselessly an endless stream of micro-niche marketed entertainment.
Love is mysterious. I don’t often know why I love things, not at first. Love is a kind of objective blindness, a critical, if not, but not excluding, visual impairment. Love makes us do stupid things. Especially new love, the love that borders on infatuation. So we require breaks from love, to understand what we love, to be able to parse out love from mere infatuation. We need contrast.
I don’t love Pandora: the internet radio station, it irks me. I haven’t listened to it in years, maybe it’s better now. Pandora programs a whole list of songs for you based on what you like. Supposedly songs you don’t like, should you choose to inform Pandora which songs these are, also help guide the program to curate music for you. I never found this to be true, but I gave up pretty early on. My main problem with Pandora was that no matter which song or artist I requested, the bulk of what Pandora played for me were cheap approximations of the thing I liked, and not the thing itself. And said cheap approximations were often the very things I hated most. If were to select Pearl Jam as a station, invariably I’d end up with way too many songs by Creed. Put in Beck and you get Kid Rock. Enter Kanye West and you end up with Drake. Most people like Drake.
Recently I read George Saunders essay collection The Braindead Megaphone. I hated it. Passionately. But it didn’t really merit any actual hate. I’d be hard pressed to say the essay collection is good, but it certainly isn’t bad. If you already like George Saunders you will like this collection, and if you are generally a fan of quirky slightly postmodern influenced writing, this collection may be for you. But I experienced The Braindead Megaphone as the Creed to A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again’s Pearl Jam. Pandora assumes if I like Pearl Jam I like grunge, and if I like grunge then I’ll like Creed, and also Bush and Candlebox. But I HATE Bush and Candlebox, and I have no love for Stone Temple Pilots either. I don’t even really like Soundgarden all that much and while I don’t hate them I never cared one whit for Alice in Chains. Correspondingly I love David Foster Wallace but I could barely think of an author I’ve hated more than Dave Egggers who seemed exactly the Stone Temple Pilots to Wallace’s Pearl Jam, the most blatant of knock-offs. Pandora thinks that if I love Wallace then I’ll also love Zadie Smith, but I don’t love Zadie Smith. Pandora thinks that if I love Nirvana then I’ll love the Melvins, who so inspired Nirvana, which means if I love Wallace I should love Pynchon, but I don’t love Pynchon. I love instead Martin Amis, who would be more the equivalent of The Cure, or Blur or Pulp or Wire (something perhaps between Pulp and Wire) or even U2 (probably not U2) some kind of British Alternative rock act that was not grunge and which predated grunge, but was not wholly dissimilar from Grunge. (Easton Ellis is in this case- Nine Inch Nails?, except I don’t really care for Ellis’s fiction, just his podcast, and I love Nine Inch Nails). I love Jane Smiley, whose writing gained prominence at a roughly similar time to Wallace’s, and whose musical equivalent I would generously say is Lucinda Williams. A little country, a little rock, a little dark, sometimes repetitive and hokey. What I love, I discovered, through the contrast of my hate, is a certain integrity that each artist has regardless of what style or genre of art they practice. There is no one genre or style I love. I love some hip hop, some country, some pop, some jazz, some rock, folk, R&B. I don’t generally like reggae all that much, mostly cuz it’s so sluggish and repetitive but play it a little faster and I am there. I’m not a big classical or instrumental music listener. In books I lean towards literary fiction, but I have never assumed that just because a book is slotted in that category that I will like it. Most books I read I don’t like. And every time I don’t like a book it helps me to understand even more why I do like the books I love. When I read the quirky travel pieces in The Braindead Megaphone,Saunders’ annoyingly precious namaste-chanting Ned Flanders tone made it all the more clear for me why I so prefer Wallace’s work. Wallace had his quirks, and for some, his annoying and precious habits, but no piece of Wallace reportage ever came back as a stylized version of just what you’d expect. Sure, you expect him not to have much fun, and he doesn’t, and you expect a high word count, footnotes, etc, and you get it, but what he finds on his reporting trips, almost no one else would find, or even choose to look at, or rather, obsess over.
I’m not going to go on anymore about my love for Wallace, what could be more cliché than a 40year old middle class white guy clinging to his love of DFW and Nirvana. I’ll own my trope and I’ll accept any mockery that might result from it.
I welcome your critique of my critique. The real value of critique and criticism and honest debate and discourse is to try and understand our preferences, and hopefully, our differences, in a productive way. When Scott pointed out my hypocrisy I welcomed his calling me out, what I didn’t welcome was his insinuation that I had no right to speak, a crime I think, much worse than shit talking. I welcomed Boudinot’s critique of MFA students––I think if he had stated it in a different way perhaps, his points could have helped the programs improve. Stated unkindly, as he did, he inspired instead a very spirited if perhaps too defensive conversation.
I don’t want to live in a world where there’s no negativity and no criticism. When the gatekeepers of culture decide not go negative, what happens, in my opinion, is what is happening to our national economy, what happened to Japan’s economy, “stagflation” A sort of swelling without any growth. By bailing out banks but not investing in infrastructure, by maintaining near zero interests rates to prop up lending and home buying yet de-incentivising age old economic like saving accounts, our government has created a kind of narcotized economy where for the great mass of citizens there is little pain and little reward. In the arts, the culture of being okay with everything is leading to everything being just ok. Few highs, plenty of lows, and an endless sea of meh.
I don’t love it.