Sunday, March 14, 2004
Sunday Morning Book Review
"Many critics, including quite a few superlative ones, are content to describe what is in front of them. This is no mean feat: Writing about (for example) music is indeed like dancing about architecture, and in the midst of all those gyrations, it's hard enough to report what you're seeing or hearing. There is, however, a smaller cadre of critics -- call them the Delta Force of cultural journalism -- who move beyond the descriptive into the realm of metaphysical inquiry. How do books, or films or songs affect us? To what extent do works of art make up the building blocks, the amino acids, of our inner lives?
" 'To attempt to describe how music pervades and flavors a life,' O'Brien confesses early on, 'feels a little like an invasion of privacy, even if the privacy is my own. Listening to music, which can be the very embodiment of public life (whether at Woodstock or marching down Fifth Avenue on the Fourth of July), is finally the most inward of acts - so inward that even language, even the language of thought, can come to seem intrusive.'
Pop Goes the Critic. (James Marcus on SONATA FOR JUKEBOX: Pop Music, Memory and the Imagined Life, by Geoffrey O'Brien.) ¶ 3/14/2004 08:03:00 AM
"Many critics, including quite a few superlative ones, are content to describe what is in front of them. This is no mean feat: Writing about (for example) music is indeed like dancing about architecture, and in the midst of all those gyrations, it's hard enough to report what you're seeing or hearing. There is, however, a smaller cadre of critics -- call them the Delta Force of cultural journalism -- who move beyond the descriptive into the realm of metaphysical inquiry. How do books, or films or songs affect us? To what extent do works of art make up the building blocks, the amino acids, of our inner lives?
" 'To attempt to describe how music pervades and flavors a life,' O'Brien confesses early on, 'feels a little like an invasion of privacy, even if the privacy is my own. Listening to music, which can be the very embodiment of public life (whether at Woodstock or marching down Fifth Avenue on the Fourth of July), is finally the most inward of acts - so inward that even language, even the language of thought, can come to seem intrusive.'
Pop Goes the Critic. (James Marcus on SONATA FOR JUKEBOX: Pop Music, Memory and the Imagined Life, by Geoffrey O'Brien.) ¶ 3/14/2004 08:03:00 AM
