I know I could take the bait, but oh, I know I'd never surface
I remain tired to an unreal and maddening degree, but yesterday I managed to visit ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
phi on flyby and this evening I finally unpacked almost the last of our fragile things into the glass-fronted cabinet. Certain others seem to have remained in storage, such as the fossil fish, my slot machine token, spatch's collection of bottles. We will track them down. Have some links.
1. A.S. Byatt has died. For years I felt like the one person in my entire circle of friends who had failed to love Possession (1990); in fact I bounced off most of her novels, most badly The Children's Book (2009), but I loved her short fiction, especially the paired novellas of Angels & Insects (1992), the first half of Elementals (1998), and the frame story and Loki of Ragnarok (2011). I was just watching Bonnie Wright's Medusa's Ankles (2018), a short film based on Byatt's 1990 short story of the same name; it feels in some ways like a deliberate dodge of its source material and in others like an abundant homage to its rich, visual, tactile text and bittersweetness. Her stories were sharp jewel boxes.
2. I love that the Blaschka glass invertebrates have traveled from the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology to Mystic Seaport for an exhibition of their own, Spineless: A Glass Menagerie of Blaschka Marine Invertebrates. I am undeservedly charmed that this article headlines one of my favorites, Stiliger ornatus, with its gold-banded, algae-tinted cerata, which I have coveted on every visit since 2014.
3. I had such a surprised reaction to a statement by Roger Ebert quoted in Richard Brody's "Siskel, Ebert, and the Secret of Criticism"—
"When you disagree on a movie," Ebert said, "you're not disagreeing on the movie. You're disagreeing on who you are. If I don't like a movie and he does, then I'm not saying that the movie is flawed, I'm saying that he's flawed."
—that I am trying to source further context on it, since it is not clear, either, from the biography which Brody is reviewing, whether Ebert meant strictly the dynamic of his arguments with Gene Siskel or criticism in general and whether he thought it was a feature or a bug or merely a fact of human interaction, because the attitude described is one of the least helpful I can encounter in either professional criticism or casual conversation. Nothing deep-sixes a discussion of art faster than the conflation of quality with taste, never mind mixing in personal rejection. That way lies fan wank unto the fourth generation. [edit: further context sourced bykore in comments.]
4. For example, David Ehrenstein's "Desert Fury, Mon Amour" (1988) depends on defining the movie in question as "quintessentially mediocre," for which he makes a cogent, technical case with which I cannot bring myself to agree independent of my instant affection for the picture—it's too weird to be the middle of the road as opposed to all over it—but it is a masterful piece of film writing all the same. Its extra-textual analysis is especially valuable. I have no idea why I haven't read his Open Secret: Gay Hollywood 1928–1998 (1998).
5. I meant to share this poem some time back, but events overtook me: Matthew Hollis, "The Diomedes."
phi on flyby and this evening I finally unpacked almost the last of our fragile things into the glass-fronted cabinet. Certain others seem to have remained in storage, such as the fossil fish, my slot machine token, spatch's collection of bottles. We will track them down. Have some links.1. A.S. Byatt has died. For years I felt like the one person in my entire circle of friends who had failed to love Possession (1990); in fact I bounced off most of her novels, most badly The Children's Book (2009), but I loved her short fiction, especially the paired novellas of Angels & Insects (1992), the first half of Elementals (1998), and the frame story and Loki of Ragnarok (2011). I was just watching Bonnie Wright's Medusa's Ankles (2018), a short film based on Byatt's 1990 short story of the same name; it feels in some ways like a deliberate dodge of its source material and in others like an abundant homage to its rich, visual, tactile text and bittersweetness. Her stories were sharp jewel boxes.
2. I love that the Blaschka glass invertebrates have traveled from the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology to Mystic Seaport for an exhibition of their own, Spineless: A Glass Menagerie of Blaschka Marine Invertebrates. I am undeservedly charmed that this article headlines one of my favorites, Stiliger ornatus, with its gold-banded, algae-tinted cerata, which I have coveted on every visit since 2014.
3. I had such a surprised reaction to a statement by Roger Ebert quoted in Richard Brody's "Siskel, Ebert, and the Secret of Criticism"—
"When you disagree on a movie," Ebert said, "you're not disagreeing on the movie. You're disagreeing on who you are. If I don't like a movie and he does, then I'm not saying that the movie is flawed, I'm saying that he's flawed."
—that I am trying to source further context on it, since it is not clear, either, from the biography which Brody is reviewing, whether Ebert meant strictly the dynamic of his arguments with Gene Siskel or criticism in general and whether he thought it was a feature or a bug or merely a fact of human interaction, because the attitude described is one of the least helpful I can encounter in either professional criticism or casual conversation. Nothing deep-sixes a discussion of art faster than the conflation of quality with taste, never mind mixing in personal rejection. That way lies fan wank unto the fourth generation. [edit: further context sourced by
kore in comments.]4. For example, David Ehrenstein's "Desert Fury, Mon Amour" (1988) depends on defining the movie in question as "quintessentially mediocre," for which he makes a cogent, technical case with which I cannot bring myself to agree independent of my instant affection for the picture—it's too weird to be the middle of the road as opposed to all over it—but it is a masterful piece of film writing all the same. Its extra-textual analysis is especially valuable. I have no idea why I haven't read his Open Secret: Gay Hollywood 1928–1998 (1998).
5. I meant to share this poem some time back, but events overtook me: Matthew Hollis, "The Diomedes."
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIqUH6nxOIs
I can't look at it all now bc we're about to eat dinner (late) but it will be interesting to see that quote in context!
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Thank you for running that down! I saw the citation of 20/20 in Singer, but I didn't see a footnote in either Brody's article or the version of Opposable Thumbs visible to me on Google Books. Have a nice dinner!
[edit] The segment is framed in terms of their antagonism, such that Siskel is introduced saying of Ebert, "It's been my mission, since I was twenty-three years old, to beat him. That's eighteen years ago. He is the one person in Chicago that I must destroy in print," and Lynn Sherr describes the cross-talk of their show as "unscripted, unrehearsed, unmitigated war." The context is as follows, having shown a clip of Siskel and Ebert full bore disagreeing about Full Metal Jacket:
Sherr: "It felt to me as if you were putting him down, in a very real way. That wasn't acting. You were really putting him down."
Ebert: "We have real arguments. When you disagree on a movie, you're not disagreeing on the movie. You're disagreeing on who you are. You see, if I don't like a movie and he does, then I'm not saying, you know, that the movie is flawed or that the movie isn't flawed, I'm saying that he's flawed. He—there's a flaw in his character that makes him like that movie. And so basically it's a very personal thing . . . There is sometimes hostility. We are sometimes extremely angry with each other. And this is based upon the fact that we are completely incompatible in terms of our personalities."
Siskel: "Roger has this style about him that drives me crazy. He—I have described him as a party unto himself."
Ebert: "I mean, to him competition is absolutely the beginning and the end of the day, and I occasionally take a few hours off. I like to tell jokes or something."
Siskel: "I know all of his jokes. I could do all of his jokes. And then the laughter that he supplies in case anyone else doesn't laugh."
So it sounds more like depiction than endorsement, but depiction of a particularly prickly case in which both critics have a lot of ego tied up in the disagreement, although the show makes sure to collect evidence of both of them saying nice things about the other before fading out on another highly colored argument. The closing music is "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off."
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It reminded me how much I do not enjoy debates about books, movies etc. which contain that aggressive element of who gets to be Right, as opposed to the kind of compare-and-contrast of what worked for one person and what didn't for another which I can do basically forever because it is fundamentally more interesting to me. And sometimes you can explain what you love about a piece of art to someone such that they understand exactly the depth and rationale of your feelings about it and it still bores them, annoys them, or leaves them cold! But that's how art works. You can't take it personally even when it's yours, otherwise you'd never survive an audition or a submission or a show.