Re: "A hatred, even a widely shared one, is still in need of justification": One of the things I have enjoyed about reading your work is the clarity and nuance you bring. I may share a general dislike of something, but not have distilled the WHY. Often, I read your work not knowing the subject matter at hand at all, and I become more curious about it, read more, and then go back to your essay and relish in the style (Oyler review in particular). I like being persuaded to think more about a subject, and that is what good writing does. Are people honestly complaining about a *single* essay in your collection? I believe it. They probably read short story collections expecting to like every single one, and ditto for episodes of a series, tracks on an album, etc. Woof. It is fantastic to find more than 2 amazing gems in a collection of *anything*, and I am always grateful when I do.
Some people are complaining about much more than that! Generally, though, I've been very lucky in that the book has been very warmly received--but of course it's difficult not to fixate on the criticisms, however few and far between they are. Still, I think it's healthy to try to consider the serious objections carefully, to see if any have merit, and I think the notion that mindfulness is low-hanging fruit is probably the best one. Although maybe not so good that I'll do anything differently in the future, lol
I seem to have different premises about this than a lot of people do. To me, if an idea is influential or seems so, and it’s bad, it’s worth attacking. You don’t have to refute only the steelman version of a position if the strawperson version is out there influencing people, as it CONSTANTLY is! I get up every day and am like “Damn, there sure are a lot of straw people walking around, yapping on my TV, having podcasts everybody likes, writing books with names like ‘Twelve Rules for Life’ that my students read and ask me about,” and they are making a mess of things and I want someone to light them on fire.” I get why the strawman thing is a norm in philosophy but in public writing you go after whatever needs going after. There appear to be many people who think Kurzweil isn’t insane, and they need your help.
<3 This is very well put, and I tend to agree. The question is just when and in what domain an idea really qualifies as influential. But mindfulness is influential by any measure, so I feel affirmed in my choice to despise it in print!
One reason to write about what you don’t like is so that you can articulate what you DO like. Sometimes it’s only in this opposition that we can actually understand why we feel drawn to one thing over another, or why one thing moves us while another leaves us cold. By criticizing what we consider bad art, we can outline our vision of good art. This is what I do at least; I criticize something to understand myself better.
The other thing is, we can’t really assume everyone holds the same views as us, even in our little online bubbles. I like your writing and I like mindfulness, although I dislike the way it’s been co-opted by what I believe you once called “prophets of rationality” (can we also say productivity prophets?). So now I’m gonna have to read your essay to see what this is all about, and even if we disagree I’ll have a clearer picture of mindfulness and my relationship to it.
Yes, my bubble is not as homogeneous as I might have expected when it comes to mindfulness in particular. A LOT of people who are otherwise sympathetic to most of what I think really bristle at my aversion to meditation. The practice certainly been co-opted by productivity prophets (absolutely apt phrase for them)--and more generally, it's been co-opted by bumbling westerners with no sense of its historical context, as I argue in the essay. I'd be curious to hear what you think of it. I tried hard to emphasize that I don't have a problem with small doses of meditation as a treatment for anxiety, and that I take issue only with attempts to inflate mindfulness into a more all-encompassing philosophy, but people still seem to feel I'm too dismissive of the whole enterprise!
the thing that is missed in this conversation is that there is a clear difference between critical writing as a consumer product and critical writing as a form of public discourse. the "you should focus on spotlighting hidden gems rather than ragging on the popular thing" critique clearly comes from an attitude that assumes you're writing in the "consumer product" mode, when it seems to me that you're clearly doing the "public discourse" mode instead.
that seems like a problem that has less to do with you and / or the audience and more an issue that the publication should be addressing by making clear what mode of critical writing they're interested in publishing. publications like the post seem to want both the prestige of doing art criticism but also the broad appeal of a consumer review (even though those goals are fundamentally incompatible), and that leads directly to folks talking past each other when they're trying to litigate the "value" of a given critical piece.
This is extremely true. It's probably the case that in any widely circulated national publication, there will be a mixture of consumer-guide-type criticism and public-discourse type criticism. But precisely for this reason, writing for such a big audience with such diverse expectations can be a disorienting experience. Most of my prior writing appeared in small literary journals whose readers understand that criticism aspires to be art in its own right, so it can be jarring to even encounter this alternative and in my view lesser framework....
Surely, if no-one expressed an opinion that had already been expressed elsewhere, a lot of people would miss out on reading about that opinion altogether. And completely separate to this is the joy that reading a beautifully crafted article (or in the case of your book, set of essays) brings.
I was struck by the thematic cohesion within your book and I felt that the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. I found it thought-provoking, witty and utterly engaging and I am very thankful that it now resides on my bookshelf.
Hi Becca, I just finished your book and I loved it! I did complain about the mindfulness essay recently though, and even used "straw man" while doing so. I am very sure my blog post is not what you are responding to - it's a personal blog and the post was mostly about game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final - but figured I could expand on what I meant. My objection was that you seemed to equate having a mindfulness practice to never judging, or never thinking critically, but in practice, most people who meditate do so for like 15 minutes a day, a couple days a week, and that's generous. They are free to judge away the rest of the time. I've read the books, done the apps, taken in person classes and so on. I know some teachers and writers make sweeping statements about mindfulness being an all-day every-day thing, and you quoted some, but in reality this just isn't how people experience it. I just finished a book by Pema Chodron, and she definitely says some pretty out there things about extending loving kindness to everyone, without judgement etc but like... she is a Buddhist monk. I don't read that and think that I must rise to her standard to practice mindfulness, you know? It seemed like such an extreme argument to make a point, which I thought you could make handily without it.
I feel a little shitty leaving this comment, but you did ask what we thought :) I loved every essay in the book, including this one - the stuff about the positive thinking movement was fascinating.
Don't feel shitty! This makes a lot of sense. I think the real question is: when is it worth it to engage with the best possible version of something, vs. a worse version that appears to be more popular/have more cultural cachet? There probably isn't a right answer, but I maybe should've tried harder to find the better versions of mindfulness!
definitely don’t think you or any of us should feel particularly beholden to the likely audience of the work. It feels true to me that some of the best experiences of art come from being surprised, which seems to be the issue at hand here (“everyone is likely to agree on this issue so why bother”). But I think a lot of the writing I’m most drawn to comes from the writer going off about whatever, without seeming to care what I’ll think about it (I love essayistic digressions in fiction; Garth Greenwell’s upcoming novel has an amazing one of these!). so I guess the conditions of the possibility of the un-revelatory essay topic are also the conditions of the possibility of the revelatory one (the writer writing what she wants to, audience be damned). I guess I mean that our anticipating what will/won’t surprise the reader counter to our desire to follow through a thought process probably(?) extinguishes the possibility of the surprise we’re trying to serve anyway, at least eventually?
I am soooososoooo excited to read Garth's book! I think you're right--anyone who's a sufficiently distinctive stylist (as Garth is!) is incapable of writing something derivative, anyway, even if the topic that he is she tackles is a familiar one. my problem is that my brain has been steeping in the foul waters of academia for so long that I can't help but flinch when I think about making an argument that's already been made. but the best writing I do, I think, always comes from some personal compulsion/curiosity in which I think try to involve the reader. and often what compels or obsesses me is precisely something that's been discussed to death but not yet in a way that scratches my itch. (i feel this way about trad wives....I have to write about them eventually....)
would love to hear what you think of Garth's novel when you read it—I think it's really a marvel. I think your point about style is spot-on...a writer like Sebald has made me fall in love with the poetry of things I never would have cared about or noticed before. I think when I started reading literature as an adult it was a huge revelation to me that style can serve a phenomenological purpose, I guess even that literature as a whole can serve a phenomenological purpose, and that that has gone both ways for me...i.e. that the way I see the world can change and open. I guess to wrap it back around I think that's the kind of revelation I look for in writing and in reading and it has to follow from some genuine compulsion rather than a feeling of obligation or necessity. there's a great interview in TNY by Elif Batuman of Céline Sciamma where Sciamma talks about breaking down a script into "needed" scenes and "wanted" scenes and just throwing the "needed" ones away. I think I've always had some kind of (naive?) faith that that compulsion is more powerful than whether or not the ideas are original...it was a conversation I got into a lot in music school, where a professor of mine told me that one of the reasons she didn't play solo rep anymore was because she 'didn't think she could bring anything to the table,' or I guess say anything that hadn't been said. But I always felt like that was basically nonsensical, mostly because I think the obsession (with an idea, with a piece of music) is a kind of lens through which to view the thing, and if it's strong enough what comes out is probably original by virtue of the peculiarity of the lens...maybe. (Avoiding calling the lens "distorting," but that's probably what I mean, just not pejoratively.) also, I bought that Katherine Anne Porter book you mentioned—looking forward to it!
My favourite kind of writing sharpens the brain - and I think your well-articulated criticism is that cultural whetstone my brain welcomes and appreciates. I don’t think your latest review is low-hanging fruit because 1) I honestly had no idea who Ray Kurzweil was and appreciated your rigorous assessment of his blinkered book 2) his tech-is-superior-to-humans view (and therefore A.I. is the answer to everything - even as it’s forced on us without consent or consensus) is saturating the direction of culture even as the people most vulnerable to its worst effects have been entirely overlooked as, say, Adobe, Meta, etc, rip off our creations through fine print we can’t object to (in the EU, it seems people can opt out of Instagram stealing their pics, but in Australia, there apparently is no recourse).
My favourite kind of criticism also contextualises a world I don’t know. I remember Roxane Gay’s take on 50 Shades and her honing in on the author’s clumsy detail about wine (in a world of apparent privilege and luxury) just revealed how janky and unstable the foundations of that fantasy was.
As for covering stuff you have negative views of - honestly, it can be very useful and illuminating as long as it’s not just a dead-end “this sucks”. What’s insightful is exactly why something sucks. Which was what made your RK review so great. You covered all the missing reality from his techno-optimism.
Even on a basic consumer review level, negative feedback (like a bad review of a toilet brush that doesn’t live up to its slick YouTube marketing - it looks good, but doesn’t actually twist and flex in a way that will adequately remove the crao from your toilet bowl!) has loads of value for anyone who just is browsing for a tool that will get the job done.
I’ve been lucky that most of my projects have been so small-scale and niche that the online reviews they generated were mostly positive (of the “friends who were nice enough to say something supportive!” or “people cheering on an indie project!” kind); recently I had a podcast that got a larger audience than anything I had ever done and as I read through the first few reviews, they were very different in tone, LOL. The podcast was about reassessing how food is valued - who decides that rice is “bad?” and how do you reconcile that with the fact that throughout most of Asia, rice is considered so essential that “have you eaten rice yet?” Is a common greeting, for instance. I went into food history and talked to dietitians who offered cultural context and nuance about rice (eg if you’re worried about GI levels, basmati is lower GI than Jasmine; and if you add an acid - like lemon to a Greek chicken rice that one particular dietitian loved - then it also lowers the GI). But people were upset I didn’t talk to personal trainers or adopt a “gym-bro” view on food. I was initially deflated, but tried to take the perspective that, well, I appreciated that they even listened to the podcast. And a friend pointed out it meant my show had broken through to an audience that may not have otherwise listened to it (even if they gave it a low rating)! I’m still open to feedback about the show, but audience understanding shapes that. I guess it comes down to “useful criticism” and “criticism that maybe misses the point”. Sometimes the latter can remind you of what you were aiming for and funnily enough, prove useful in its own unexpected way. (But of course, some opinions are just trash. LOL.)
Thanks for your well-crafted reckoning with everything you encounter - your latest post was a welcome reminder that I should buy your book (which I just did)!
thank you for buying my book and for this wonderful and thoughtful comment!
yeah, i think bad reviews, at their best, show how an object is reflective of something important about the culture in which it's produced. someone like kurzweil strikes me as representative of something bigger. he's not just an isolated crank: he's the voice of an ideology that's common in Silicon Valley and that is therefore dominant the world over, as you say, and for that reason it's useful (I hope!) to explain why he's so misguided.
your podcast experience is very familiar to me! when i was writing mostly for small literary magazines, people would disagree with me sometimes, but never quite so aggressively. also, i had some understanding of the demographics likely to read my pieces, so I knew what they might dislike about them. i could predict that a pan of, e.g., sally rooney would irritate various critics who had celebrated her, etc. now that i write for a national newspaper, i have absolutely no understanding of many of the demographics that happen upon my work and what they want from a newspaper book review, and i'm constantly confused by the bazillion ways it's possible to object to things that would never even have occurred to me. it's helpful to remember that you can't write or podcast for everyone. it sounds like your critics were doing something that i think is the cardinal sin in a book review: demanding that your podcast just....be something other than what it was. (in the book review analog, someone writes a review in which they express irritation that the book they read is not an entirely different book that they might have written.)
I greatly appreciated the essay on mindfulness in your book, and I'm actually posting about both your essay and Dr. Britton tomorrow. I can't say that I share your revulsion, maybe more like a distaste...but then again I've never practiced mindfulness in a clinical, secular setting and I don't want to. I think it would be a worthy subject to investigate the original practices and purposes of mind-training. The religious goals are in some ways, not that much different than the secular ones--to reduce suffering--but the worldview is entirely different. And that's what makes me queasy.
Thanks! I look forward to reading your post. I've meditated for, e.g., ten minutes at a time successfully, but mindfulness as an entire philosophical approach or ideology seems to me to make no sense when detached from the traditions that gave rise to it. As you say, the worldview under-girding the practice is what makes all the difference! And it seems like so many of these western mindfulness popularizers have made no serious attempt to engage with the traditions that gave rise to it...
Yes, and what’s striking to me is that it’s really hard to completely secularize mindfulness because the practice naturally leads to states of being that are prioritized within some worldviews and not others. Like, it was right of you to ask in your essay: why not be judgmental? Nonjudgmental awareness is value in Buddhism, so then you have a Buddhist value sneaking into a non-Buddhist secular environment, and that can feel uncomfortable. For me, at least, this divorce from tradition brings up a lot about ethics, esp. because meditation isn’t necessarily “safe.” If secular mindfulness experts engaged more with Buddhist traditions, they would find a body of info of people not responding well to meditation. Anyway, I look forward to reading more of your writing on this topic! It’s so juicy!
loooove the bit about good writing through mediocre objects; my favorite of these belongs to Genie Brinkema, her “A Mother is a Form of Time,” on, of all things, Gilmore Girls (https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/41850967.pdf)—as always, you’re brilliant, loved this and the book
oh Genie is a goddess. Her ongoing revision of the tyranny of the affect in favor of a radical formalism is not dissimilar to a certain book advocating scale and intensity in the face of popular culture’s minimalism trend that I can think of ;)
You have to continue writing about these subjects, even those which your audience ostensibly hates. I didn't know I hated mindfulness until I heard you talking about it, and then it made so much sense why it was associated with people like Harris and Huberman.
My magazine-writing experience has taught me a lesson the other direction: praise doesn't really work, unless it's got a historical context.
When I wrote about the Beatles, William Goldman or MAD Magazine (all for The New Yorker) my unabashed admiration came through and nobody minded because all the critical controversy is safely in the past and those things are great, right? But when I tried to write about the Marvel movies (a piece that was spiked) or about the Museum of Modern Art's new renovation, it was more problematic — I was "being a fan"; "uncritical" etc. And those pieces were really not that different; it was just that the cultural entity in question was part of today's world and therefore the reflexive critical position must be skepticism; dubiousness; a collective fear that things are going astray (or that the visceral disdain the reader feels for whatever popular thing is justified).
Obviously there can't be a big sexy imbroglio over something new unless someone has conspicuously loved or hated it out of the gate, and a lot of the time it's love (even when it's a bizarre situation like Norman Mailer and Jack Henry Abbot or Leonard Bernstein and the Beatles) (again, safely in the past) but the contemporary=bad/popular=bad template is hard to violate. I mean, what if I pitched an article about just how good Apple's new machine learning tech is? How far would I get compared to if I was going around darkly suggesting that it's poised to plunge society even further into Orwellian dystopia?
Obviously I understand that the tendency I'm describing is a healthy one that can't be untangled from the basic meaning of commentary in the public square going back to the Agora etc. (and I've never been involved in one of the big pile-on-in-both-directions so I'm not really qualified to discuss this). I'm just suggesting that there's a general tendency to assume that the critic liking the popular or new thing has got to have something wrong with his/her perception; we have to wait for the "real" voices to weigh in, and cut the thing down to size.
Do I sound hopelessly naive and unfit for this debate? I don't know. I devour every anti-Jordan-Petersen screed because of course there are terrible people and institutions that must be relentlessly attacked until they're torn down...but I feel like there just isn't enough room to LIKE new stuff without coming across like a naïf.
I think this is fair! Although I think it's also outlet-dependent. I can see why it might be hard to rave about something widely regarded as cringey and gauche in a higher brow literary magazine, but I think a lot of that kind of stuff gets a much more positive treatment in large national newspapers. I mean, Dr. Fauci's book--the most cringe, wine-mom-coded book of all!--has been generously reviewed across the board, including by me. (It was a kind of gripping book!) But I think you're right that the "take economy" that operates less in the general world and more in the "literary world" often rewards spicy pans but not careful appreciations. (I've complained about this before on here.) A lot of critics with reputations for being scary actually write just as many raves as pans, but the pans are the things that go viral. I'm not sure the problem is editors, though, much as public appetites.
(B) is the general truth I think. Articulating the why is waaaay harder, interesting, etc. than merely sharing a dislike or even sharing a general set of reasons for the dislike. But specifically in the mindfulness case: of course you should have criticized it. Otherwise very smart ppl all around me are into mindfulness or at least kinda dig the vibes or passively accept the vibes despite maybe not being that into it. Another example might be the many not anti-vaxxers in a given cultural milieu who for some reason kinda passively accept crystal and tarot and Goop pseudo-wellness vibes.
Re: "A hatred, even a widely shared one, is still in need of justification": One of the things I have enjoyed about reading your work is the clarity and nuance you bring. I may share a general dislike of something, but not have distilled the WHY. Often, I read your work not knowing the subject matter at hand at all, and I become more curious about it, read more, and then go back to your essay and relish in the style (Oyler review in particular). I like being persuaded to think more about a subject, and that is what good writing does. Are people honestly complaining about a *single* essay in your collection? I believe it. They probably read short story collections expecting to like every single one, and ditto for episodes of a series, tracks on an album, etc. Woof. It is fantastic to find more than 2 amazing gems in a collection of *anything*, and I am always grateful when I do.
Some people are complaining about much more than that! Generally, though, I've been very lucky in that the book has been very warmly received--but of course it's difficult not to fixate on the criticisms, however few and far between they are. Still, I think it's healthy to try to consider the serious objections carefully, to see if any have merit, and I think the notion that mindfulness is low-hanging fruit is probably the best one. Although maybe not so good that I'll do anything differently in the future, lol
I seem to have different premises about this than a lot of people do. To me, if an idea is influential or seems so, and it’s bad, it’s worth attacking. You don’t have to refute only the steelman version of a position if the strawperson version is out there influencing people, as it CONSTANTLY is! I get up every day and am like “Damn, there sure are a lot of straw people walking around, yapping on my TV, having podcasts everybody likes, writing books with names like ‘Twelve Rules for Life’ that my students read and ask me about,” and they are making a mess of things and I want someone to light them on fire.” I get why the strawman thing is a norm in philosophy but in public writing you go after whatever needs going after. There appear to be many people who think Kurzweil isn’t insane, and they need your help.
<3 This is very well put, and I tend to agree. The question is just when and in what domain an idea really qualifies as influential. But mindfulness is influential by any measure, so I feel affirmed in my choice to despise it in print!
One reason to write about what you don’t like is so that you can articulate what you DO like. Sometimes it’s only in this opposition that we can actually understand why we feel drawn to one thing over another, or why one thing moves us while another leaves us cold. By criticizing what we consider bad art, we can outline our vision of good art. This is what I do at least; I criticize something to understand myself better.
The other thing is, we can’t really assume everyone holds the same views as us, even in our little online bubbles. I like your writing and I like mindfulness, although I dislike the way it’s been co-opted by what I believe you once called “prophets of rationality” (can we also say productivity prophets?). So now I’m gonna have to read your essay to see what this is all about, and even if we disagree I’ll have a clearer picture of mindfulness and my relationship to it.
Yes, my bubble is not as homogeneous as I might have expected when it comes to mindfulness in particular. A LOT of people who are otherwise sympathetic to most of what I think really bristle at my aversion to meditation. The practice certainly been co-opted by productivity prophets (absolutely apt phrase for them)--and more generally, it's been co-opted by bumbling westerners with no sense of its historical context, as I argue in the essay. I'd be curious to hear what you think of it. I tried hard to emphasize that I don't have a problem with small doses of meditation as a treatment for anxiety, and that I take issue only with attempts to inflate mindfulness into a more all-encompassing philosophy, but people still seem to feel I'm too dismissive of the whole enterprise!
the thing that is missed in this conversation is that there is a clear difference between critical writing as a consumer product and critical writing as a form of public discourse. the "you should focus on spotlighting hidden gems rather than ragging on the popular thing" critique clearly comes from an attitude that assumes you're writing in the "consumer product" mode, when it seems to me that you're clearly doing the "public discourse" mode instead.
that seems like a problem that has less to do with you and / or the audience and more an issue that the publication should be addressing by making clear what mode of critical writing they're interested in publishing. publications like the post seem to want both the prestige of doing art criticism but also the broad appeal of a consumer review (even though those goals are fundamentally incompatible), and that leads directly to folks talking past each other when they're trying to litigate the "value" of a given critical piece.
This is extremely true. It's probably the case that in any widely circulated national publication, there will be a mixture of consumer-guide-type criticism and public-discourse type criticism. But precisely for this reason, writing for such a big audience with such diverse expectations can be a disorienting experience. Most of my prior writing appeared in small literary journals whose readers understand that criticism aspires to be art in its own right, so it can be jarring to even encounter this alternative and in my view lesser framework....
Surely, if no-one expressed an opinion that had already been expressed elsewhere, a lot of people would miss out on reading about that opinion altogether. And completely separate to this is the joy that reading a beautifully crafted article (or in the case of your book, set of essays) brings.
I was struck by the thematic cohesion within your book and I felt that the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. I found it thought-provoking, witty and utterly engaging and I am very thankful that it now resides on my bookshelf.
thank you so much <3
Hi Becca, I just finished your book and I loved it! I did complain about the mindfulness essay recently though, and even used "straw man" while doing so. I am very sure my blog post is not what you are responding to - it's a personal blog and the post was mostly about game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final - but figured I could expand on what I meant. My objection was that you seemed to equate having a mindfulness practice to never judging, or never thinking critically, but in practice, most people who meditate do so for like 15 minutes a day, a couple days a week, and that's generous. They are free to judge away the rest of the time. I've read the books, done the apps, taken in person classes and so on. I know some teachers and writers make sweeping statements about mindfulness being an all-day every-day thing, and you quoted some, but in reality this just isn't how people experience it. I just finished a book by Pema Chodron, and she definitely says some pretty out there things about extending loving kindness to everyone, without judgement etc but like... she is a Buddhist monk. I don't read that and think that I must rise to her standard to practice mindfulness, you know? It seemed like such an extreme argument to make a point, which I thought you could make handily without it.
I feel a little shitty leaving this comment, but you did ask what we thought :) I loved every essay in the book, including this one - the stuff about the positive thinking movement was fascinating.
Don't feel shitty! This makes a lot of sense. I think the real question is: when is it worth it to engage with the best possible version of something, vs. a worse version that appears to be more popular/have more cultural cachet? There probably isn't a right answer, but I maybe should've tried harder to find the better versions of mindfulness!
definitely don’t think you or any of us should feel particularly beholden to the likely audience of the work. It feels true to me that some of the best experiences of art come from being surprised, which seems to be the issue at hand here (“everyone is likely to agree on this issue so why bother”). But I think a lot of the writing I’m most drawn to comes from the writer going off about whatever, without seeming to care what I’ll think about it (I love essayistic digressions in fiction; Garth Greenwell’s upcoming novel has an amazing one of these!). so I guess the conditions of the possibility of the un-revelatory essay topic are also the conditions of the possibility of the revelatory one (the writer writing what she wants to, audience be damned). I guess I mean that our anticipating what will/won’t surprise the reader counter to our desire to follow through a thought process probably(?) extinguishes the possibility of the surprise we’re trying to serve anyway, at least eventually?
I am soooososoooo excited to read Garth's book! I think you're right--anyone who's a sufficiently distinctive stylist (as Garth is!) is incapable of writing something derivative, anyway, even if the topic that he is she tackles is a familiar one. my problem is that my brain has been steeping in the foul waters of academia for so long that I can't help but flinch when I think about making an argument that's already been made. but the best writing I do, I think, always comes from some personal compulsion/curiosity in which I think try to involve the reader. and often what compels or obsesses me is precisely something that's been discussed to death but not yet in a way that scratches my itch. (i feel this way about trad wives....I have to write about them eventually....)
would love to hear what you think of Garth's novel when you read it—I think it's really a marvel. I think your point about style is spot-on...a writer like Sebald has made me fall in love with the poetry of things I never would have cared about or noticed before. I think when I started reading literature as an adult it was a huge revelation to me that style can serve a phenomenological purpose, I guess even that literature as a whole can serve a phenomenological purpose, and that that has gone both ways for me...i.e. that the way I see the world can change and open. I guess to wrap it back around I think that's the kind of revelation I look for in writing and in reading and it has to follow from some genuine compulsion rather than a feeling of obligation or necessity. there's a great interview in TNY by Elif Batuman of Céline Sciamma where Sciamma talks about breaking down a script into "needed" scenes and "wanted" scenes and just throwing the "needed" ones away. I think I've always had some kind of (naive?) faith that that compulsion is more powerful than whether or not the ideas are original...it was a conversation I got into a lot in music school, where a professor of mine told me that one of the reasons she didn't play solo rep anymore was because she 'didn't think she could bring anything to the table,' or I guess say anything that hadn't been said. But I always felt like that was basically nonsensical, mostly because I think the obsession (with an idea, with a piece of music) is a kind of lens through which to view the thing, and if it's strong enough what comes out is probably original by virtue of the peculiarity of the lens...maybe. (Avoiding calling the lens "distorting," but that's probably what I mean, just not pejoratively.) also, I bought that Katherine Anne Porter book you mentioned—looking forward to it!
My favourite kind of writing sharpens the brain - and I think your well-articulated criticism is that cultural whetstone my brain welcomes and appreciates. I don’t think your latest review is low-hanging fruit because 1) I honestly had no idea who Ray Kurzweil was and appreciated your rigorous assessment of his blinkered book 2) his tech-is-superior-to-humans view (and therefore A.I. is the answer to everything - even as it’s forced on us without consent or consensus) is saturating the direction of culture even as the people most vulnerable to its worst effects have been entirely overlooked as, say, Adobe, Meta, etc, rip off our creations through fine print we can’t object to (in the EU, it seems people can opt out of Instagram stealing their pics, but in Australia, there apparently is no recourse).
My favourite kind of criticism also contextualises a world I don’t know. I remember Roxane Gay’s take on 50 Shades and her honing in on the author’s clumsy detail about wine (in a world of apparent privilege and luxury) just revealed how janky and unstable the foundations of that fantasy was.
As for covering stuff you have negative views of - honestly, it can be very useful and illuminating as long as it’s not just a dead-end “this sucks”. What’s insightful is exactly why something sucks. Which was what made your RK review so great. You covered all the missing reality from his techno-optimism.
Even on a basic consumer review level, negative feedback (like a bad review of a toilet brush that doesn’t live up to its slick YouTube marketing - it looks good, but doesn’t actually twist and flex in a way that will adequately remove the crao from your toilet bowl!) has loads of value for anyone who just is browsing for a tool that will get the job done.
I’ve been lucky that most of my projects have been so small-scale and niche that the online reviews they generated were mostly positive (of the “friends who were nice enough to say something supportive!” or “people cheering on an indie project!” kind); recently I had a podcast that got a larger audience than anything I had ever done and as I read through the first few reviews, they were very different in tone, LOL. The podcast was about reassessing how food is valued - who decides that rice is “bad?” and how do you reconcile that with the fact that throughout most of Asia, rice is considered so essential that “have you eaten rice yet?” Is a common greeting, for instance. I went into food history and talked to dietitians who offered cultural context and nuance about rice (eg if you’re worried about GI levels, basmati is lower GI than Jasmine; and if you add an acid - like lemon to a Greek chicken rice that one particular dietitian loved - then it also lowers the GI). But people were upset I didn’t talk to personal trainers or adopt a “gym-bro” view on food. I was initially deflated, but tried to take the perspective that, well, I appreciated that they even listened to the podcast. And a friend pointed out it meant my show had broken through to an audience that may not have otherwise listened to it (even if they gave it a low rating)! I’m still open to feedback about the show, but audience understanding shapes that. I guess it comes down to “useful criticism” and “criticism that maybe misses the point”. Sometimes the latter can remind you of what you were aiming for and funnily enough, prove useful in its own unexpected way. (But of course, some opinions are just trash. LOL.)
Thanks for your well-crafted reckoning with everything you encounter - your latest post was a welcome reminder that I should buy your book (which I just did)!
thank you for buying my book and for this wonderful and thoughtful comment!
yeah, i think bad reviews, at their best, show how an object is reflective of something important about the culture in which it's produced. someone like kurzweil strikes me as representative of something bigger. he's not just an isolated crank: he's the voice of an ideology that's common in Silicon Valley and that is therefore dominant the world over, as you say, and for that reason it's useful (I hope!) to explain why he's so misguided.
your podcast experience is very familiar to me! when i was writing mostly for small literary magazines, people would disagree with me sometimes, but never quite so aggressively. also, i had some understanding of the demographics likely to read my pieces, so I knew what they might dislike about them. i could predict that a pan of, e.g., sally rooney would irritate various critics who had celebrated her, etc. now that i write for a national newspaper, i have absolutely no understanding of many of the demographics that happen upon my work and what they want from a newspaper book review, and i'm constantly confused by the bazillion ways it's possible to object to things that would never even have occurred to me. it's helpful to remember that you can't write or podcast for everyone. it sounds like your critics were doing something that i think is the cardinal sin in a book review: demanding that your podcast just....be something other than what it was. (in the book review analog, someone writes a review in which they express irritation that the book they read is not an entirely different book that they might have written.)
I greatly appreciated the essay on mindfulness in your book, and I'm actually posting about both your essay and Dr. Britton tomorrow. I can't say that I share your revulsion, maybe more like a distaste...but then again I've never practiced mindfulness in a clinical, secular setting and I don't want to. I think it would be a worthy subject to investigate the original practices and purposes of mind-training. The religious goals are in some ways, not that much different than the secular ones--to reduce suffering--but the worldview is entirely different. And that's what makes me queasy.
Thanks! I look forward to reading your post. I've meditated for, e.g., ten minutes at a time successfully, but mindfulness as an entire philosophical approach or ideology seems to me to make no sense when detached from the traditions that gave rise to it. As you say, the worldview under-girding the practice is what makes all the difference! And it seems like so many of these western mindfulness popularizers have made no serious attempt to engage with the traditions that gave rise to it...
Yes, and what’s striking to me is that it’s really hard to completely secularize mindfulness because the practice naturally leads to states of being that are prioritized within some worldviews and not others. Like, it was right of you to ask in your essay: why not be judgmental? Nonjudgmental awareness is value in Buddhism, so then you have a Buddhist value sneaking into a non-Buddhist secular environment, and that can feel uncomfortable. For me, at least, this divorce from tradition brings up a lot about ethics, esp. because meditation isn’t necessarily “safe.” If secular mindfulness experts engaged more with Buddhist traditions, they would find a body of info of people not responding well to meditation. Anyway, I look forward to reading more of your writing on this topic! It’s so juicy!
loooove the bit about good writing through mediocre objects; my favorite of these belongs to Genie Brinkema, her “A Mother is a Form of Time,” on, of all things, Gilmore Girls (https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/41850967.pdf)—as always, you’re brilliant, loved this and the book
first line is already fire
oh Genie is a goddess. Her ongoing revision of the tyranny of the affect in favor of a radical formalism is not dissimilar to a certain book advocating scale and intensity in the face of popular culture’s minimalism trend that I can think of ;)
omg I'm so excited to read this!!!!!!!!
You have to continue writing about these subjects, even those which your audience ostensibly hates. I didn't know I hated mindfulness until I heard you talking about it, and then it made so much sense why it was associated with people like Harris and Huberman.
<3 this is exactly what i set out to do!
My magazine-writing experience has taught me a lesson the other direction: praise doesn't really work, unless it's got a historical context.
When I wrote about the Beatles, William Goldman or MAD Magazine (all for The New Yorker) my unabashed admiration came through and nobody minded because all the critical controversy is safely in the past and those things are great, right? But when I tried to write about the Marvel movies (a piece that was spiked) or about the Museum of Modern Art's new renovation, it was more problematic — I was "being a fan"; "uncritical" etc. And those pieces were really not that different; it was just that the cultural entity in question was part of today's world and therefore the reflexive critical position must be skepticism; dubiousness; a collective fear that things are going astray (or that the visceral disdain the reader feels for whatever popular thing is justified).
Obviously there can't be a big sexy imbroglio over something new unless someone has conspicuously loved or hated it out of the gate, and a lot of the time it's love (even when it's a bizarre situation like Norman Mailer and Jack Henry Abbot or Leonard Bernstein and the Beatles) (again, safely in the past) but the contemporary=bad/popular=bad template is hard to violate. I mean, what if I pitched an article about just how good Apple's new machine learning tech is? How far would I get compared to if I was going around darkly suggesting that it's poised to plunge society even further into Orwellian dystopia?
Obviously I understand that the tendency I'm describing is a healthy one that can't be untangled from the basic meaning of commentary in the public square going back to the Agora etc. (and I've never been involved in one of the big pile-on-in-both-directions so I'm not really qualified to discuss this). I'm just suggesting that there's a general tendency to assume that the critic liking the popular or new thing has got to have something wrong with his/her perception; we have to wait for the "real" voices to weigh in, and cut the thing down to size.
Do I sound hopelessly naive and unfit for this debate? I don't know. I devour every anti-Jordan-Petersen screed because of course there are terrible people and institutions that must be relentlessly attacked until they're torn down...but I feel like there just isn't enough room to LIKE new stuff without coming across like a naïf.
I think this is fair! Although I think it's also outlet-dependent. I can see why it might be hard to rave about something widely regarded as cringey and gauche in a higher brow literary magazine, but I think a lot of that kind of stuff gets a much more positive treatment in large national newspapers. I mean, Dr. Fauci's book--the most cringe, wine-mom-coded book of all!--has been generously reviewed across the board, including by me. (It was a kind of gripping book!) But I think you're right that the "take economy" that operates less in the general world and more in the "literary world" often rewards spicy pans but not careful appreciations. (I've complained about this before on here.) A lot of critics with reputations for being scary actually write just as many raves as pans, but the pans are the things that go viral. I'm not sure the problem is editors, though, much as public appetites.
(B) is the general truth I think. Articulating the why is waaaay harder, interesting, etc. than merely sharing a dislike or even sharing a general set of reasons for the dislike. But specifically in the mindfulness case: of course you should have criticized it. Otherwise very smart ppl all around me are into mindfulness or at least kinda dig the vibes or passively accept the vibes despite maybe not being that into it. Another example might be the many not anti-vaxxers in a given cultural milieu who for some reason kinda passively accept crystal and tarot and Goop pseudo-wellness vibes.