Mr. Grim sent me the following contribution to the thread about criticism:
Lethal Eggs
Thanks for pointing to the McSweeney's dialogue. I was as surprised by Lethem's searching inarticulateness as I was by Eggers whiny pusillanimity and thin skin. As you mentioned, there's part of me that agrees with Eggers and that Vonnegut quotation (there's a first). Attacking a novel is like mounting a charge against a hot fudge sundae. The climate is so hostile to the reception of almost any book that needs a critic's attention that the standard critical apparatus of the book community should become more supportive of good work, less dismissive and more constructive. If he doesn't actually say it, Eggers implies an abandonment of aesthetic criteria--that we should celebrate fecundity for fecundity's sake. If there are more Bowie albums out there, better for everyone; more Woody Allen movies, hooray.
If Woody Allen, to take Eggers' example, is criticized for being too prolific, that's an unfortunate transposition of the viewer's disappointment in his newest baddest film onto the myth of process, the time-costing equation of which is inspiration + craft = art. It is a curious vestige of the anti-Victorian Romanticism we reserve only for our artists. If an artist, though, puts out work with a calendrical regularity, we assume a loss of inspiration. The case with Woody Allen is more accurately that his recent movies stopped being any good. Perhaps we shouldn't bemoan him his prolificacy (as I have been guilty of doing), but should just stop seeing his movies. "Celebrity" wasn't soul-shrinkingly bad because it came so close on the heels of "Deconstructiung Harry"; it was bad because it was an arguably misogynistic and lead-footed, mark-missing satire with a lot of recycled and obvious jokes (to begin with). I wouldn't wish that Philip Roth wrote one fewer word in the last forty years, and I especially value everything this decade. His work seems to enrich life and literature (including his own). The confusion in the case of Woody Allen is that it's like a person who is at first charming, then annoying, then miserable, the more you get to know them--you've been too long in his presence. It is inevitable that the worse work will make you reevaluate the better. I know too little about the Dylan canon to chime in on that.
-Gary Morris, sometime Friday morning
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