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Blogger Ann Althouse found this sentence in The New Yorker.
Yes, The New Yorker. If you are old enough, you remembera time when we
could count on The New Yorker to publish great writing. If not great, at least, very, very good. Those days seem long
gone, sacrificed to the gods of political correctness.
The sentence, from an Alexandra Schwartz article on Bob
Dylan, called by Althouse “laughably bad.”
What
sets great writers apart from the pack is their ability to connect with readers
on a visceral level. We feel their work in our brains and in our guts, in the
blood coursing in our veins and the adrenaline swelling our necks, in the way
our hearts contract with pain or swell with joy as we read.
Calling this laughably bad is overly generous.
Worse yet, Schwartz is not just your average itinerant
crank. She has been awarded the National
Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing for
2014.
Somewhere William Shawn is groaning in disbelief.
2 comments:
Reads like a New York writer to me. (Bummer for them.)
"If you are old enough, you remembera time when we could count on The New Yorker to publish great writing."
Sure. I remember tbat. It was in the same era that peopļe read Playboy for the highbrow articles and interviews.
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