Tag: 05.03

Critics Or Muggers?

Bad reviews suck. Particularly bad book reviews. “There’s no appeals process. No way to defend yourself in the court of public opinion, nor to question the critic’s qualifications. Whatever they say, you eat. Period. Of course, if you happen to be named Clancy or King, or even Updike, a bad review doesn’t matter so much, because you’ve already got an established audience. But for most writers, the plain cold fact is that critics determine how your work is regarded by most of the world. Consider the math: Tens of thousands of people read the reviews in major newspapers. Only a fraction of that number ever read the books being reviewed. If anything, writers suffer bad reviews more deeply than other artists.”

Is Vaclav Havel The New George Orwell?

“Vaclav Havel, the 66-year-old former Czech president who was term-limited out of office on February 2, built his reputation in the 1970s by being to eyewitness fact what George Orwell was to dystopian fiction. In other words, he used common sense to deconstruct rhetorical falsehoods, pulling apart the suffocating mesh of collectivist lies one carefully observed thread at a time. Like Orwell, Havel was a fiction writer whose engagement with the world led him to master the nonfiction political essay.”

When The Arts Mattered On BBC – And How They Disappeared

How did the arts disappear on BBC? “First, expelling the arts from the main channels. We have seen the almost complete disappearance of the arts from BBC1. So, goodbye Omnibus, after 35 years. It was also decided that even BBC2, a “minority channel” for challenging programmes, shouldn’t be cluttered up with the arts. So, if they survived the culling of the mid-1990s-when long-running series like ‘The Late Show’ and ‘Bookmark’ were killed off—arts programmes were booted onto BBC4. The BBC does not even have a music and arts department any more. It is now part of specialist factual programming. Then there is the retreat from seriousness.”