Rushfield Babylon

Before the screening, an HBO executive took the podium, informing us that “what you will see tonight will astound you.” In his introduction, the supernaturally coiffed Sorkin opened with an apology that Olivia Munn was not actually in the first episode of the season, and so we would thus not be seeing her work this evening. When the crowd settled down from its horror, he muttered that, oh yeah, Jane Fonda isn’t in it, either.

He told the story of the moment a few years back when his agents asked what he wanted to do next. For a man aspiring toward the elite, there could only be one answer. “I said I wanted to do a show for HBO.” Sorkin said his agents retorted in jest, “That will never happen. Maybe we can get you a staff job on iCarly.“ (iCarly being a situation comedy favored by idiot tweens as opposed to the sophisticated novelistic adult entertainment purveyed on the Home Box Office network.)

Dave Eggers explaining why the enormously successful writers are the only people whose opinions about books are valid or should be trusted.

And he wonders why some of us go to a dark, dank place where we just want to throw things.

As I’ve stated before, the internet, in particular as it lets people hide behind cloaks of anonymity to launch attacks, is often little more than a gif’d up, electronic lynch mob.  As a matter of principle and emotional survival, I don’t read comments on sites that allow anonymous, unfiltered registration.

However, arts criticism was not invented by the internet and is in all likelihood as old as the arts themselves.  Aeschylus and Euripedes wrote their dramas for Athens’ annual theater contest, in which there were winners, and losers.   

No one is forcing anyone to perform on a public stage.  If you’ve written a book about New Orleans flood survivors that is too precious to bear criticism, you are perfectly entitled to just make copies to distribute to your family who will tell you nothing but how wonderful you are.  No one is forcing anyone to take a book deal or a movie deal and if you turn it down, civilization will go on and your void will be filled.

But if you put something out into the public, it is presumably because you wish to communicate and provoke a response, and you realize not everything is for everyone’s tastes; that not all responses will be simply adoring smiles and pats on the head; that in fact, those positive words are meaningless without some opposition.  That if all we hear is praise, the praise has no meaning.  

And that, in fact, perhaps not every book is the best book ever written. Perhaps not every book is even your best book, inconvenient as that may be to hear once you’ve climbed to the top of the heap and feel the best thing for everyone would be just to keep the spigot of praise flowing until the end of time without qualification.

Yes, not all criticism is great or insightful - just as not all books or movies are great or insightful.  In the short run, it is the loudest that gets the most attention.  But eventually, if all you have to say as a critic is “I hate that” you’ll be drowned out in favor of others who have something more insightful to offer…just the same as an author who has nothing more to say than “Awww…yay for us” is not likely to be making too many people’s top tens twenty years from now.

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