What is a review? What are they doing, and what makes a good one?
Read More
Okay, so our first night in California, Edgar’s sisters insisted on putting on Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2, which is a uniquely bad film.
Read More
World builders can diverge from reality quite a bit, and for fantastical stories, this is compulsory, whether something as restrained as Hav by Jan Morris or as outre and surreal as the work of Leonora Carrington. However, not all divergences from reality are created equal, and they should all be to roughly the same degree in the same work — most importantly, the writer should understand what the big asks from their work is and implies.
Read More
The root of this, I believe, lies in the privileging of “realism” over other modes of expression in aesthetics. By this, I mean the idea that art is supposed to be a mimetic reproduction of things that would “really happen”. Leaving aside, of course, the number of really-occurring events that get you treated as insane if you acknowledge.
Read More
We attempt to communicate something, to elicit some feeling, from the people who perceive our art, and we, perceiving, respond somehow — or don’t, which suggests that perhaps that artwork does not speak to us or for us or in our language. (This will come back to haunt us.)
Read More