The Critics Respond, Part Seven
To begin, I should thank Jalopnik's Travis Okulski for linking to "Return Of The Mack" yesterday and sending me a few thousand readers. Some of them were even willing to concede that the article was not dumb, per say.
Not dumb.
Per say. What he meant to write was per se --- Latin for "of itself" or "for itself" depending on how strict your Latin teacher was. Mine wound up kicking me out of class, mostly for disciplinary issues. It's always tempting to simply dismiss what somebody like this has to say about one's writing, but that's almost certainly a mistake. Yes, the use of "per say" indicates that we are not dealing with a classically educated individual, or one who is particularly well-read. Still, this is a reader --- a customer --- so I will take a moment to consider his (it's Jalopnik, there's a near-"mathematical certainty" that it's a he) criticism.
After reading what he wrote a few times, I've boiled it down to "Your (meaning my) analogy doesn't hold true to the extent that you think it does." My analogy was, roughly speaking:
1968-1970 -> 2008-2010. The height of the "cheap speed"/brilliant engine era for both periods.
American automakers of 1973 -> Euro automakers of 2013. Caught in a crossfire of high fuel prices and legislative demands.
Big bumpers for crash testing -> high hoods for pedestrian safety standards. Changes in the look of the car to satisfy the legislators.
NOx emissions -> CO2 emissions. Arbitrary restrictions put in place by regulatory bodies at a pace that feels difficult to the automakers.
smog-strangled catalyst/thermal reactor engines -> Four-cylinder turbos. Reduction in power, capacity, enjoyability, durability for the purpose of complying with those restrictions
expensive low-powered American cars -> Expensive small-engine German cars. The new cars aren't as satisfying as the old.
Did I make the case for each analogy? I believe I did, but not all the readers were convinced. This is a problem you face any time you write something shorter than The Origin Of Species: you have limited space to make your argument. "Return Of The Mack" was 2100 words. With 3100 words I could have pushed harder, but I would have lost more readers along the way. There's little I can do there other than to attempt to make each point in as succinct a manner as possible. Which, incidentally, is something that my critics, both friendly and hateful, don't think I do very well. "It could be said in half the space," is something I hear a lot. My response to that is usually something along the lines of "But then there's no pleasure in saying it."
Others, as with Mr. Persay above, accepted the general premise of the analogies but felt that I "took it too far". Some TTACers felt that I was directly comparing the 1973 Oldsmobile 88 to the 2013 BMW 528i, and they were eager to tell me how much better the latter was than the former. This is something you can turn aside with what I think of as "the idiot disclaimer," as imagined below:
She was a long, muscular erotic hurricane, seemingly entwining him with six limbs at once as her carbon-fiber-valved heart clicked at hummingbird speed and she breathed "Oh, Jack" into his ear. HEY EVERYBODY SHE HAD JUST TWO ARMS AND TWO LEGS OKAY SHE WASN'T A BIRD/ROBOT/OCTOPUS/HUMAN EXPERIMENT AND SHE DIDN'T REALLY HAVE SIX LIMBS OK DO YOU UNDERSTAND?
I despise having to write the idiot disclaimer. Had I done so in this case, however, something along the lines of
Now, nobody's claiming that a 2013 BMW 328i won't dust a 1973 --- or even a 2003 --- Oldsmobile seven ways to sundown. But the variation between the 1968 and 1973 cars seems to be repeating in the modern ear
I could have turned away some percentage of my critics on this count. But a certain number of them would gloss over the paragraph anyway and still complain. It makes you want to leave the idiot disclaimer out when you realize that it doesn't protect you against all the idiots.
Yesterday I read a blogpost by a young writer whom I quite like, in which he opined that
Writing is a deliberately one-sided profession. Someone trots out an idea, you read it, you move on. If you don’t like it, you don’t continue reading. There is no—there should be no—voicing back to the writer.... But no, the reader should be seen and not heard, absolutely unto forever. Smarter people with more time on their hands may correct me, and take the utmost smug pleasure in doing so, but Hemingway wasn’t bogged down by reader’s letters, nor Poe dumped a mailbag of postcards from his publisher.
The Guardian's obituary of LJK Setright showed that my friend isn't alone in that sentiment:
And although he greatly enjoyed communicating with readers en masse, he offered no one the slightest hope of individual contact. "It cannot be too widely known," he used to say, "that Setright does not indulge in correspondence." He was pleased to know that his opinions would be discussed, but was content that the discussion should proceed without him.
I'm afraid that I must disagree with both BZR and LJK here. The strongest writing in Western history took place in atmospheres of near-claustrophobic criticism; think classical Athens or eighteenth-century London. Pope wrote the Epistle to Arbuthnot because he felt he couldn't cross the street without receiving an in-person criticism of his work from the man on that particular street. Hemingway got plenty of letters; he also spent years of his life eating lunch with people who vigorously criticized his work. Hell, Hemingway got into a fistfight with one of his critics. The hell with this Kinja business; let's scrap it out on the street!
Sadly, the modern critic rarely comes up to the standard of Wallace Stevens or Catullus or even Harold Bloom. He's more likely a mook on YouTube reminding Johnny Lieberman for the millionth time that he's incompetent as a video host, or a so-called shitposter on Autoblog taking issue with the first paragraph of a story he didn't bother to finish, or a mom's-basement type on Jalopnik eagerly attacking my work and my intellectual foundation with two pounding fingers. That doesn't mean that I, the writer, should feel empowered to simply dismiss him. He's a customer and I'm writing for him. Even if I'm not writing...
for him.
Per say.