New York Reads

No time to delve into elaborate criticisms, unedited ramblings, and typos as usual, so I’ll just recommend these three articles and promise to comment sometime in the future.

Our boy Tony Scott adds his two cents to the what do critics do debate. I think, by the informal rules of this blog, I’m obligated to comment on this. And later I will. You can occupy your time till then with the following articles.

Drama nerds (especially those, like myself, concerned with drama as text rather than as show) should rejoice at this Tim Parks article on Beckett in The New York Review of Books. In typical NYROB lit-geek fashion, it’s long, intricate, and pretty wonderful. Dig the close readings, kids:

Even [Beckett's] language aligns itself with this imprisoning environment as groups of words are repeated as though to form the walls that close Murphy in: "eaten, drunk, slept, and put his clothes on and off" is mirrored by "eating, drinking, sleeping, and putting his clothes on and off," while in between "a medium-sized cage of north-western aspect" faces "medium-sized cages of south-eastern aspect." Those compound, hyphenated adjectives—medium-sized, north- western—reinforce the sense of entrapment, making the irony that Murphy's room might "command" a view even heavier.

If passages like that don't make you sweat like a double major word geek in a beer-fueled dorm debate during finals week, well, you're probably a well-adjusted human who has no business reading this blog.

And returning in the New York Times, Janet Maslin makes up for all of William Grimes’ sins with this delightfully vicious takedown of the new Shyamalan-worship handbook, The Man Who Heard Voices. Ruth Franklin may believe that there’s not enough bile in book reviewing, but Maslin deploys enough blunt negativity to kill an entire girl scout troop, beginning by calling out the book as a “full length, unintentionally riotous puff book.”